  Today scheduling problems have an immense effect on various areas of human
lives, be it from their application in manufacturing and production industry,
transportation, or workforce allocation. The unrelated parallel machines
scheduling problem (UPMSP), which is only one of the many different problem
types that exist, found its application in many areas like production
industries or distributed computing. Due to the complexity of the problem,
heuristic and metaheuristic methods are gaining more attention for solving it.
Although this problem variant did not receive much attention as other models,
recent years saw the increase of research dealing with this problem. During
that time, many different problem variants, solution methods, or other
interesting research directions were considered. However, no study has until
now tried to systematise the research in which heuristic methods are applied
for the UPMSP. The goal of this study is to provide an extensive literature
review on the application of heuristic and metaheuristic methods for solving
the UPMSP. The research was systematised and classified into several categories
to enable an easy overview of the different problem and solution variants.
Additionally, current trends and possible future research directions are also
shortly outlined.
