Stretching Technique-Based Clonal Selection Algorithm for Flexible Job-shop Scheduling

Flexible job-shop scheduling problem (FJSP) is expanded from the traditional job-shop scheduling problem (JSP), which possesses wider availability of machines for all the operations. The aim is to find an allocation for each operation and to define the sequence of operations on each machine so that the resulting schedule has a minimal completion time. This paper introduces a hybrid meta-heuristic, the stretching technique-based immune algorithm, consisting of a combination of the stretching technique and clonal selection algorithm (CSA). The proposed method is used for solving the multi-objective FJSP. The details of implementation for the multi-objective FJSP and the corresponding computational experiments are reported. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm is an efficient approach for the multi-objective FJSP, especially for large scale problems.