Scheduling with Inserted Idle Time: Problem Taxonomy and Literature Review

In the context of production scheduling, inserted idle time (IIT) occurs whenever a resource is deliberately kept idle in the face of waiting jobs. IIT schedules are particularly relevant in multimachine industrial situations where earliness costs and/or dynamically arriving jobs with due dates come into play. We provide a taxonomy of environments in which IIT scheduling is relevant, review the extant literature on IIT scheduling, and identify areas of opportunity for future research.