Immune-inspired evolutionary algorithm for constrained optimization

This paper proposes an artificial immune system based algorithm for solving constrained optimization problems, inspired by the principle of the vertebrate immune system. The analogy between the mechanism of vertebrate immune system and constrained optimization formulation is first given. The population is divided into two groups- feasible individuals and infeasible individuals. The infeasible individuals are viewed as the inactivated immune cells approaching the feasible regions by decreasing the constraint violations whereas the feasible individuals are treated as activated immune cells searching for the optima. The interaction between them through the extracted directional information is facilitated mimicking the functionality of T cells. This mechanism not only encourages infeasible individuals approaching feasibility regions, but facilitates exploring the boundary between the feasible and infeasible regions in which optima are often located. This approach is validated and performance is quantified by the benchmark functions used in related researches through statistical means with those of the state-of-the-art from various branches of evolutionary computation paradigms. The performance obtained is fairly competitive and in some cases even better.