Research on Permutation Flow-shop Scheduling Problem based on Improved Genetic Immune Algorithm with vaccinated offspring

This work proposes a hybrid of GA and immune algorithm for permutation flowshop scheduling problems to overcome the problem of GAs early convergence during the evolutionary processes. The proposed algorithm, called VacGA, introduces vaccination into the field of GAs based on the theory of immunity in biology. VacGA employs a GA to perform global search and an artificial immune system to perform local search. VacGA has been tested on Taillard's benchmarks, and compared with standard GA and the best existing hybrid GAs. The obtained results shed light on the efficiency of our new hybrid method. Furthermore, the effects of some parameters are discussed.