A review and classification on distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problems

The Distributed Permutation Flowshop Scheduling (DPFS) problem is one of the fastest-growing topics in the scheduling literature, which in turn is among the most prolific fields in Operational Research (OR). Although the problem has been formally stated only twelve years ago, the number of papers on the topic is growing at a rapid pace, and the rising interest –both from academics and practitioners– on distributed manufacturing paradigms seems to indicate that this trend will continue to increase. Possibly as a side effect of this steady growth, the state-of-the-art on many decision problems within the field is far from being clear, with substantial overlaps in the solution procedures, lack of (fair) comparisons against existing methods, or the use of different denominations for the same problem, among other issues. In this paper, we carry out a review of the DPFS literature aimed at providing a classification and notation for DPFS problems under a common framework. Within this framework, contributions are exhaustively presented and discussed, together with the state-of-the-art of the problems and lines for future research.