A survey of scheduling problems with no-wait in process

Scheduling involving no-wait in process plays an important role in industries such as plastic, chemical, and pharmaceutical. Moreover, many scheduling problems in other industries, including surgery-scheduling problem, aircraft landing problem, and train scheduling problem, can also be modeled with no-wait constraint. The research interest in scheduling problems with no-wait in process began in 1970s and the interest has been increasing since then. Hall and Sriskandarajah (1996) presented an excellent review of the literature, covering about 130 papers, on scheduling problems with no-wait in process since 1970s until mid-1993. This paper is the second survey paper providing analysis and an extensive review of more than 300 papers that appeared since the mid-1993 to the beginning of 2016. This survey paper classifies scheduling problems based on shop environments as flowshop, job shop, or open shop. It further classifies the problems based on the performance measure considered along with some other factors. Throughout the survey paper, many independently investigated problems are determined, less studied problems are identified, and suggestions for future research directions are proposed.