Abstract: A clonal selection based memetic algorithm is proposed for solving job shop scheduling problems in this paper. In the proposed algorithm, the clonal selection and the local search mechanism are designed to enhance exploration and exploitation. In the clonal selection mechanism, clonal selection, hypermutation and receptor edit theories are presented to construct an evolutionary searching mechanism which is used for exploration. In the local search mechanism, a simulated annealing local search algorithm based on Nowicki and Smutnicki’s neighborhood is presented to exploit local optima. The proposed algorithm is examined using some well-known benchmark problems. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algo-rithm.

Key words: clonal selection algorithm, job shop scheduling problem, simulated annealing, global search, local search