Under the distributed manufacturing environment, the distributed shop scheduling is to allocate jobs to suitable factories and to determine a reasonable processing sequence in each factory to optimize certain scheduling objectives. The study on the distributed shop scheduling is of great academic significance and application value, which has been a hot topic in production scheduling field. In this paper, the state-of-the-art achievements of optimization algorithms in the distributed parallel machine scheduling, distributed flow shop scheduling, distributed job shop scheduling, distributed assembly scheduling and distributed flexible scheduling problems are mainly reviewed, and several applications of the distributed scheduling are introduced. Finally, some future research directions and contents are pointed out.