A Clonal Selection Algorithm for Makespan Minimization on Unrelated Parallel Machines with Sequence Dependent Setup Times

Abstract

This work presents a proposal to implement the clonal selection algorithm (CLONALG) for the make span minimization problem on unrelated parallel machines with sequence-dependent setup times. The initial population is created through the GRASP algorithm, whereas an evaluation function based on make span values and on a historical of recent improvements helps the algorithm to escape from local optima. A local search heuristic, based in the VND method, was used as the hyper mutation somatic operator, in order to accelerate the convergence of the algorithm. The performed experiments show that the proposed operators improve the performance of standard CLONALG algorithm as well as allow to obtain better results than those presented in the most recent literature.