A systematic review of permutation flow shop scheduling with due-date-related objectives

Abstract

The permutation flow shop is one of the most studied combinatorial optimization problems by operational research practitioners in the last decades, given its theoretical and practical characteristics. Although the explicit consideration of due dates was introduced at the beginning of the 90s, to the best of our knowledge, there is currently no survey devoted to flow shops with due-date-related objectives. This paper aims to fulfill this gap by presenting a systematic literature review. In this scope, we consider variants with two or more machines, deterministic data, and performance measures such as total tardiness, earliness and tardiness penalties, maximum lateness, and the number of tardy jobs, among others. We define five research questions and performed a deep search for documents indexed in Scopus and Web of Science databases. After removing duplicate documents and applying some qualitative fields, we select 92 articles. Aiming to address the proposed research questions, we presented an overview of the main findings and provided a comparative analysis of the solution approaches. Furthermore, we suggest future research avenues, addressed the challenges and limitations of this research field, and presented the main implications for theory and practice.