Multi-drug cancer chemotherapy scheduling by a new memetic optimization algorithm

This paper proposes a new memetic algorithm (MA) to solve the multi-drug chemotherapy optimization problem. The new MA combines GA with a local search algorithm called iterative dynamic programming (IDP). A multi-drug chemotherapy model is introduced to simulate the possible response of the tumor cells under drugs administration. Optimization of the multiple chemotherapeutic agents´ administration schedules is based on this tumor model. We formulate the optimization problem as an optimal control problem (OCP) with a set of dynamic equations. The objective is to design efficient schedules which minimize the tumor size under a set of constraints. Our new MA has been shown to be very efficient on solving our multi-drug model