Scheduling in manufacturing with transportation: Classification and solution techniques

Many modern manufacturing settings feature especially close relationship of the transportation of workpieces between production steps with the scheduling of manufacturing operations. Consider flexible manufacturing systems, reconfigurable manufacturing systems or flexible assembly lines, to name a few. In this paper, we review over 140 papers on scheduling problems in manufacturing with transportation (SchedPT). We classify the reviewed papers according to an extension of the three-field notation of Graham et al. (1979) and outline relevant problem settings, such as characteristics of transporters, material flow or of the buffer system. Afterward, we discuss selected main solution approaches to solve SchedPT. We also collected more than 60 results on polynomially solvable problem variants and performance guarantees. Based on our analysis, we formulate promising directions for future research.