A review of scheduling research involving setup considerations

The majority of scheduling research assumes setup as negligible or part of the processing time. While this assumption simplifies the analysis and/or r eflects certain applications, it adversely affects the solution quality for many applications which require explicit treatment of setup. Such applicat ions, coupled with the emergence of production concepts like time-based com petition and group technology, have motivated increasing interest to includ e setup considerations in scheduling problems. This paper provides a compre hensive review of the literature on scheduling problems involving setup tim es (costs). It classifies scheduling problems into batch and non-batch, seq uence-independent and sequence-dependent setup, and categorizes the literat ure according to the shop environments of single machine, parallel machines , flowshops, and job shops. The suggested classification scheme organizes t he scheduling literature involving setup considerations, summarizes the cur rent research results for different problem types, and finally provides gui delines for future research. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights rese rved.