This paper is a complete survey of flowshop-scheduling problems and contributions
from early works of Johnson of 1954 to recent approaches of metaheuristics
of 2004. It mainly considers a flowshop problem with a makespan criterion and it
surveys some exact methods (for small size problems), constructive heuristics and
developed improving metaheuristic and evolutionary approaches as well as some
well-known properties and rules for this problem. Each part has a brief literature
review of the contributions and a glimpse of that approach before discussing the
implementation for a flowshop problem. Moreover, in the first section, a complete
literature review of flowshop-related scheduling problems with different assumptions
as well as contributions in solving these other aspects is considered.
This paper can be seen as a reference to past contributions (particularly in n/m/
p/cmax or equivalently F/prmu/cmax) for future research needs of improving and
developing better approaches to flowshop-related scheduling problems.