A Review of Scheduling Problems with Bounded Processing/Setup Times

The scheduling literature reveals that majority of the studied scheduling problems are for the deterministic case where all parameters of jobs are known in advance and are fixed. However, in some real-world environments, the assumption of fixed parameters of jobs is not valid since job parameters are uncertain. An uncertain parameter can be modelled as a random variable within some interval with some lower and upper bounds, called bounded. The objective of this paper is to review the investigated scheduling problems with bounded processing or setup times. The scheduling literature is reviewed, the addressed problems are analysed, and classified based on shop environments (single machine, parallel machine, flowshop, job shop), performance measures, the approach taken in the papers to solve the considered problem, and interval/bounded processing times or setup times. Some future research opportunities with interval/bounded processing/setup times are presented.