The co-evolutionary immune clone algorithm and its application in zero-wait flowshop scheduling

For solving the zero-wait flowshop problem, the paper proposes an effective approach called co-evolutionary immune clone algorithm (CICA). The algorithm combines the colonial selection mechanism with the principle of immune system, and adds in a new operational of affinity mutation and a new function of activity in local operation, to make the capacity of antibodies to antigens not only relate with their affinity but also concern with their concentration, consequently improving the diversity of the antibodies and avoiding their prematurity. In collective operation, a thinking of co-evolutionary and the elite migration process in evolution are used to accelerate the convergence and achieve the purpose of optimization. The simulation result demonstrates the search precision of the CICA is more effective and highly advantageous than that of the immune algorithm and the immune colonial algorithm, thus verifies its validation and excellence. Finally, the paper discusses the influence of the incentive coefficient and the feedback coefficient on the algorithm's performance by simulation.