An artificial immune system for solving production scheduling problems: a review

This article reviews the production scheduling problems focusing on those related to flexible job-shop scheduling. Job-shop and flexible job-shop scheduling problems are one of the most frequently encountered and hardest to optimize. This article begins with a review of the job-shop and flexible job-shop scheduling problem, and follow by the literature on artificial immune systems (AIS) and suggests ways them in solving job-shop and flexible job-shop scheduling problems. For the purposes of this study, AIS is defined as a computational system based on metaphors borrowed from the biological immune system. This article also, summarizes the direction of current research and suggests areas that might most profitably be given further scholarly attention.