A review of the research methodology for the re-entrant scheduling problem

This paper considers the re-entrant scheduling problem, wherein the most remarkable character is that the jobs enter the processing lines more than once. The objective is to provide a comprehensive review which gives the researchers and practitioners an overview of the applicability of techniques in re-entrant scheduling. Few published reviews dealt with this particular kind of problem and only some research regards the re-entrant character as a hypotaxis of their main problems. This paper is the first paper that gives a full picture of the re-entrant scheduling problem. Considered as a NP-hard problem, a growing number of researchers have employed various methods to solve this complex problem. A survey has been conducted from the recently published literature on the re-entrant problem. This paper has summarised the problem and the relative research methodologies have been studied. Mathematical methods and meta-heuristics, especially Petri net, dispatching rules and genetic algorithm, emerge as the most frequently used methods in recent years, which are presented in detail. Moreover, future research implications have been identified and are suggested. It may help to bring in more awareness of the problem and new techniques to solve it.