Among the different tasks in production logistics, job scheduling is one of the most important at the operational decision-making level to enable organizations to achieve competiveness. Scheduling consists in the allocation of limited resources to activities over time in order to achieve one or more optimization objectives. Flow-shop (FS) scheduling problems encompass the sequencing processes in environments in which the activities or operations are performed in a serial flow. This type of configuration includes assembly lines and the chemical, electronic, food, and metallurgical industries, among others. Scheduling has been mostly investigated for the deterministic cases, in which all parameters are known in advance and do not vary over time. Nevertheless, in real-world situations, events are frequently subject to uncertainties that can affect the decision-making process. Thus, it is important to study scheduling and sequencing activities under uncertainties since they can cause infeasibilities and disturbances. The purpose of this paper is to provide a general overview of the FS scheduling problem under uncertainties and its role in production logistics and to draw up opportunities for further research. To this end, 100 papers about FS and flexible flow-shop scheduling problems published from 2001 to October 2016 were analyzed and classified. Trends in the reviewed literature are presented and finally some research opportunities in the field are proposed

This paper proposes a hybridized simheuristic approach that couples a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP), a Monte Carlo simulation, a Pareto archived evolution strategy (PAES), and an analytic hierarchy process (AHP), in order to solve a multicriteria stochastic permutation flow shop problem with stochastic processing times and stochastic sequence-dependent setup times. For the decisional criteria, the proposed approach considers four objective functions, including two quantitative and two qualitative criteria. While the expected value and the standard deviation of the earliness/tardiness of jobs are included in the quantitative criteria to address a robust solution in a just-in-time environment, this approach also includes a qualitative assessment of the product and customer importance in order to appraise a weighted priority for each job. An experimental design was carried out in several study instances of the flow shop problem to test the effects of the processing times and sequence-dependent setup times, obtained through lognormal and uniform probability distributions with three levels of coefficients of variation, settled as 0.3, 0.4, and 0.5. The results show that both probability distributions and coefficients of variation have a significant effect on the four decision criteria selected. In addition, the analytical hierarchical process makes it possible to choose the best sequence exhibited by the Pareto frontier that adjusts more adequately to the decision-makers’ objectives.