A survey of multi-factory scheduling

Because of current globalization trend, production has shifted from the single factory production to multi-factory production network. To become competitive in today's rapidly changing market requirements, factories have shifted from a centralized to a more decentralized structure, in many areas of decision making including scheduling. In multi-factory production network, each factory can be considered as an individual entity which has different efficiency and is subject to different constraints, for example, machine advances, worker cost, tax, close to suppliers, and transportation facilities, etc. Since limited resources make scheduling an important decision in the production, for several decades, researchers focused on determining an efficient schedule to improve the productivity. The recent remarkable attention in distributed production management in both academia and the industry has demonstrated the significance of multi-factory scheduling. For the first time, this paper provides a review on the multi-factory machine scheduling. For this, first, the paper classifies and reviews the literature according to shop environments, including single machine, parallel machines, flowshop, job shop, and open shop. Then the reviewed literature is quantified and measured. At the end, the paper concludes by presenting some problems receiving less attention than the others and proposes several research opportunities in the field.