A comprehensive review of lot streaming

Lot streaming combined lot splitting with operations overlapping is one of the effective techniques used to implement the time-based strategy in today's era of global competition. Therefore, this technique has been studied extensively over the past few decades. In this paper, we first propose a uniquely categorized structure to characterize the existing lot streaming problems in terms of three main dimensions, seven subdimensions, and 17 levels. Then, a notation set is defined to systematically express each existing lot streaming problem by seven ordered elements corresponding to the seven subdimensions. Based on the classification structure and the defined notation set, a comprehensive survey is presented to make up for the lack of a literature review on this subject. The objective is to help the reader gain a clear understanding of the evolution of previous research on lot streaming. This paper concludes with some constructive suggestions for future research directions.