A taxonomy of flexible flow line scheduling procedures

We present a taxonomy for flexible flow line scheduling procedures. Flexible flow lines are flow lines with parallel machines on some or all production stages. The taxonomy groups procedures according to their general solution approach. It distinguishes optimal and heuristic procedures. Heuristic procedures are split into holistic and decomposition approaches. While holistic approaches consider the complete scheduling problem in an integrated way, decomposition approaches divide the problem with respect to the production stages, the individual jobs, or the sub-problems to be solved (batching, loading, and sequencing). We explicitly mention the inclusion of setups in a study and list the respective objective criteria.