No-wait flow shop scheduling based on artificial immune system

M-machine no-wait flow shop (NWFSS) problem is a NP-complete problem, and a novel approach to solve this type problem is presented in this paper. A continuous flow shop problem with total flow time as criterion is considered. This paper extends the artificial immune system (AIS) approach by proposing a new methodology termed as Psycho-Clonal algorithm. Proposed algorithm enjoys the flavours of AIS and Maslow´s need hierarchy theory to evolve a Meta heuristic. Numerical simulation with small and large number of jobs with respect to error percentage is reported. The results obtained are compared with the other existing approaches. Numerical simulation has revealed that results obtained using proposed algorithm have significant improvement over others.