Recent trends in distributed production network scheduling problem

Abstract

The complex problems in the real world, an increase in competition among producers, the advancements in equipment and manufacturing products, the high cost of factory equipment and, etc., have led to the production structure change from a centralized structure to a decentralized one. In recent years, distributed systems have become increasingly important. So in order to adapt to market competition and to respond quickly to changing market demand, there is a need to study this problem. An important aspect of planning in a distributed environment is decentralized production. In such cases, it becomes more important to consider the problem of distributed scheduling. In this regard, this paper provides a systematic literature review on the multi-factory scheduling problems in the past eleven years and report the research gaps. To this end, first, the related research was classified based on the shop environments. Then, after reviewing the existing papers and summarizing them, future researches and emerging research fields of the multi-factory scheduling problem are reported. This review indicates that future research should focus on open shop production environments. The results also show only 4% of the papers focus on the virtual alliance. Therefore, researchers need to consider the virtual alliance in the production network and investigate the participation and competition between the partners in such network. Studying the topic of Industry 4.0 in multi-factory scheduling and subsequently investigating the related topics such as information sharing and real-time data are also the new trends in this field. Considering the complex series–parallel structures in the multi-factory production and defining objective functions related to environmental issues such as reducing pollutants and noise are other suggestions for future studies.