A review and classification of heuristics for permutation flow-shop scheduling with makespan objective

Makespan minimization in permutation flow-shop scheduling is an operations research topic that has been intensively addressed during the last 40 years. Since the problem is known to be NP-hard for more than two machines, most of the research effort has been devoted to the development of heuristic procedures in order to provide good approximate solutions to the problem. However, little attention has been devoted to establish a common framework for these heuristics so that they can be effectively combined or extended. In this paper, we review and classify the main contributions regarding this topic and discuss future research issues.