The fourth comprehensive review of scheduling problems with setup times

A setup time represents the time required to prepare resources for processing tasks and has a direct impact on resource utilization, system efficiency, and production costs. Consequently, scheduling problems that explicitly incorporate setup times have attracted continued attention in the scheduling literature. The first comprehensive survey on scheduling with setup times appeared in 1999, followed by subsequent surveys in 2008 and 2015, and this paper constitutes the fourth major survey in this area, focusing on research published over the past decade. The survey systematically categorizes scheduling problems according to shop environments and setup time characteristics and further classifies the surveyed studies based on the objective functions considered and the solution approaches employed. This survey specifically focuses on classical shop environments (single-machine, parallel machines, flowshop, job shop, and open shop) and excludes topics such as lot-streaming, assembly line balancing, lot-sizing, order acceptance, and batch formation problems, which require fundamentally different modeling frameworks. By organizing and synthesizing the reviewed literature, this survey provides a structured overview of dominant problem settings, commonly adopted modeling assumptions, and prevailing solution methodologies in recent research. The review explicitly identifies its scope and boundaries to provide transparency and guide readers regarding the included and excluded research areas. Beyond summarizing and classifying existing work, this survey identifies methodological gaps and imbalances in research focus and outlines promising directions for future research, including the need for systematic benchmarking and comparative evaluation of algorithms proposed for identical problem settings.