Scheduling Using Artificial Immune System Metaphors: A Review

Artificial immune systems (AIS) are relatively young emerging techniques, which explore, derive and apply different biologically inspired immune mechanisms, aimed at computational problem solving. Although several researchers have already attempted to adapt such metaphors to production and service scheduling problems, we are not aware of any literature review reporting the use of AIS for scheduling problems. This review of existing scheduling AIS applications shows that the published studies are related to several types of problems: single machine, hybrid and no wait flow shops, job shops, parallel processors. Task allocation and sequencing problems are also addressed in single or multi-objective optimization. After a first part introducing the main principles of artificial immune systems, we summarize how AIS paradigms are used and adapted in existing works to tackle scheduling problems. A discussion is then presented and, finally, several opened research directions are drawn