A literature survey on metaheuristics in production systems

Typical problems in production systems are suboptimal production scheduling, long manufacturing lead times, inefficient inventory control, low work center utilization, etc. The solutions of these problems may need complex techniques while the classical techniques are insufficient to solve them. In this chapter we first classified the problems which may be faced in production systems and then the solution techniques called metaheuristics. Based on the keywords production problems and metaheuristics, our search was resulted in about 6,500 papers. The results have been summarized by tabular forms and graphical figures. The journals frequently publishing these papers have been also classified.