A common framework and taxonomy for multicriteria scheduling problems with interfering and competing jobs: Multi-agent scheduling problems

Most classical scheduling research assumes that the objectives sought are common to all jobs to be scheduled. However, many real-life applications can be modeled by considering different sets of jobs, each one with its own objective(s), and an increasing number of papers addressing these problems has appeared over the last few years. Since so far the area lacks a unified view, the studied problems have received different names (such as interfering jobs, multi-agent scheduling, and mixed-criteria), some authors do not seem to be aware of important contributions in related problems, and solution procedures are often developed without taking into account existing ones. Therefore, the topic is in need of a common framework that allows for a systematic recollection of existing contributions, as well as a clear definition of the main research avenues. In this paper we review multicriteria scheduling problems involving two or more sets of jobs and propose an unified framework providing a common definition, name and notation for these problems. Moreover, we systematically review and classify the existing contributions in terms of the complexity of the problems and the proposed solution procedures, discuss the main advances, and point out future research lines in the topic.