Deterministic job-shop scheduling: Past, present and future

Due to the stubborn nature of the deterministic job-shop scheduling problem many solutions proposed are of hybrid construction cutting across the traditional disciplines. The problem has been investigated from a variety of perspectives resulting in several analytical techniques combining generic as well as problem specific strategies. We seek to assess a subclass of this problem in which the objective is minimising makespan, by providing an overview of the history, the techniques used and the researchers involved. The sense and direction of their work is evaluated by assessing the reported results of their techniques on the available benchmark problems. From these results the current situation and pointers for future work are provided.