A review and evaluation of multi-objective algorithms for the flowshop scheduling problem

This paper contains a complete and updated review of the literature for multi-objective flowshop problems which are among the most studied environments in the scheduling research area. No previous comprehensive reviews exist in the literature. Papers about lexicographical, goal programming, objective weighting and Pareto approaches have been reviewed. Exact, heuristic and metaheuristic methods have been surveyed. Furthermore, a complete computational evaluation is also carried out. A total of 23 different algorithms including both flowshop-specific methods as well as general multi-objective optimization approaches have been tested under three different two-criteria combinations with a comprehensive benchmark. All methods have been studied under recent state-of-the-art quality measures. Parametric and non-parametric statistical testing is profusely employed to support the observed performance of the compared methods. As a result, we have identified the best performing methods from the literature which, along with the review, constitutes a reference work for further research.