358 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART A: SYSTEMS AND HUMANS, VOL. 38, NO.
2, MARCH 2008
An Effective PSO and AIS-Based Hybrid Intelligent
Algorithm for Job-Shop Scheduling
Hong-Wei Ge, Liang Sun, Yan-Chun Liang, and Feng Qian
Abstract—The optimization of job-shop scheduling is very im-
portant because of its theoretical and practical significance. In this
paper, a computationally effective algorithm of combining PSO
with AIS for solving the minimum makespan problem of job-shop
scheduling is proposed. In the particle swarm system, a novel
concept for the distance and velocity of a particle is presented
to pave the way for the job-shop scheduling problem. In the
artificial immune system, the models of vaccination and receptor
editing are designed to improve the immune performance. The
proposed algorithm effectively exploits the capabilities of distrib-
uted and parallel computing of swarm intelligence approaches.
The algorithm is examined by using a set of benchmark instances
with various sizes and levels of hardness and is compared with
other approaches reported in some existing literature works. The
computational results validate the effectiveness of the proposed
approach.
Index Terms—Artificial immune system (AIS), artificial intelli-
gence, job-shop scheduling problem (JSSP), particle swarm opti-
mization (PSO), vaccination.
I. I NTRODUCTION
T HE JOB-SHOP scheduling problem (JSSP) is a very
important practical problem in both fields of production
management and combinatorial optimization. Efficient methods
for solving the JSSP have significant effects on profitability
and product quality. The JSSP has drawn the attention of
researchers for the last three decades, but because scheduling
problems vary widely according to specific production tasks
and most of them are strongly nondeterministic polynomial-
time hard problems, some test problems of moderate size are
still unsolved. In fact, only small-size instances of the problems
Manuscript received September 22, 2005; revised August 2, 2006. This
work was supported by the National Outstanding Youth Science Fund
(60625302), by the National “973” Plan (2002CB3122000), by the National
“863” Plan (20060104Z1081), by the National Natural Science Founda-
tion of China (60673023 and 60433020), by the Science–Technology De-
velopment Project of Jilin Province of China (20050705-2), by the “985”
Project of Jilin University of China, and by the European Commission un-
der Grant TH/Asia Link/010 (111084). This paper was recommended by
Associate Editor B. Veeravalli.
H.-W. Ge was with Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China. He is now
with the School of Information Science and Engineering, East China Univer-
sity of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China (e-mail: art21cn@
ecust.edu.cn).
L. Sun is with the College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin
University, Changchun 130012, China (e-mail: sliang@email.jlu.edu.cn).
Y.-C. Liang is with the College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin
University, Changchun 130012, China, and also with the Institute of High
Performance Computing, Singapore 117528 (e-mail: ycliang@jlu.edu.cn).
F. Qian is with the Automation Department, East China University of Science
and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China (e-mail: fqian@ecust.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TSMCA.2007.914753
1083-4427/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE
can be solved within a reasonable computational time by exact
optimization algorithms such as branch and bound [1], [2]
and dynamic programming [3], [4], including the notorious
10 × 10 instance of Fisher and Thompson, which was proposed
in 1963 and only solved 20 years later. Problems of dimension
15 × 15 are still considered to be beyond the reach of today’s
exact methods. By contrast, approximate and heuristic methods
make a tradeoff between solution quality and computational
cost. These methods mainly include dispatching priority rules
[5]–[7], shifting bottleneck approach [8], [9], Lagrangian re-
laxation [10], [11], and tabu search [12]–[14] and have made
considerable achievement. In recent years, much attention has
been devoted to metaheuristics with the emergence of new tech-
niques from the field of artificial intelligence such as genetic
algorithm (GA) [15]–[18], simulated annealing [19]–[22], ant
colony optimization [23], particle swarm optimization (PSO)
[24], [25], artificial neural network [26]–[28], artificial immune
system (AIS) [29], and so on. These metaheuristics can be re-
garded as problem-independent approaches and are well suited
to solve complex problems that may be difficult to solve by
traditional techniques. Moreover, they are capable of producing
high-quality solutions with reasonable computational effort.
Among the metaheuristic algorithms, GA has been used with
increasing frequency to address scheduling problems and may
not remain to have much room for improvement. However, the
use of PSO and AIS for the solution of scheduling problems has
been scarce, specifically the PSO. In addition, many research
results of the JSSP show that it is difficult to obtain a good-
enough solution only by single search scheme. Motivated by
these perspectives, we propose a novel hybrid intelligent algo-
rithm for the JSSP based on the PSO and AIS in this paper.
Both PSO and AIS are evolutionary computation techniques
based on swarm intelligence. They exhibit implicit parallelism
and contain certain redundancy and historical information of
past solutions. Therefore, the proposed hybrid algorithm also
effectively exploits the capabilities of distributed and parallel
computing of swarm intelligence approaches.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
introduces and formulates the JSSP. Section III describes the
proper representation for the problem and proposes a schedule
initialization algorithm based on the Giffler and Thompson
(G&T) algorithm. PSO- and AIS-based scheduling algorithms
are proposed in Sections IV and V, respectively, which are
followed by Section VI that shows the framework of the
hybrid intelligence algorithm (HIA) based on the previous
two sections. Section VII reports the corresponding computa-
tional and comparative results. Finally, conclusions are made in
Section VIII.
GE et al.: EFFECTIVE PSO AND AIS-BASED HYBRID INTELLIGENT ALGORITHM
II. JSSP
The job-shop problem studied in the paper consists of
scheduling a set of jobs on a set of machines with the objective
of minimizing the makespan, i.e., the maximum of completion
times needed for processing all jobs. Each machine can handle
at most one job at a time. Each job consists of a chain of
operations that is to be processed in a specified sequence, on
specified machines, and during an uninterrupted time period of
given length.
Explaining the problem more specifically, let J = {1, 2,
. . . , n} denote the set of jobs, M = {1, 2, . . . , m} represent the
set of machines, and O = {0, 1, . . . , n × m, n × m + 1} be the
set of operations that is to be scheduled, where 0 and n × m + 1
represent the dummy initial and final operations, respectively.
The operations are interrelated by the precedence constraints,
which force each operation j to be scheduled after all pre-
decessor operations Pj are completed. Moreover, operation j
can only be scheduled if the machine that it requires is idle.
Furthermore, let Tj and Fj denote the fixed processing time
and the finish time of operation j, respectively, let A(t) be the
set of operations being processed at time t, and let ejm = 1
if operation j is required to process on machine m (ejm = 0
otherwise).
The conceptual model of the JSSP can be stated as [30]
min Fn×m+1 (1)
s.t. Fk ≤ Fj − Tj , j = 1, 2, . . . , n × m + 1; k ∈ Pj
(2)

tion, each job number occurs m times in the permutation. By
ejm ≤ 1, m ∈ M; t≥0 (3)
j∈A(t)
Fj ≥ 0, j = 1, 2, . . . , n × m + 1. (4)
The objective function (1) minimizes the finish time of the
last operation, namely, the makespan. Constraint (2) imposes
the precedence relations between operations. Constraint (3)
represents that one machine can only process one operation
at a time, and constraint (4) forces the finish times to be
nonnegative.
The solution of the JSSP can be represented as the operation
permutation of jobs on each machine. The total number of
all possible schedules (both feasible and infeasible) is (n!)m
for problems with n jobs and m machines. Obviously, it is
impossible to exhaust all the alternatives for finding the optimal
solution even if the values of n and m are small. For example,
for the Fisher–Thompson benchmark problem of ten jobs to ten
machines, it has a search space with a size at about 3.96 × 1065 .
Thus, it is necessary to restrict the search space and to guide
the search process. There are four types of feasible schedules in
JSSP, namely, inadmissible, semiactive, active, and nondelay.
Inadmissible schedules contain excess idle time, and they can
be improved by forward-shifting operations until no excess idle
time exists. Semiactive schedules contain no excess idle time,
but they can be improved by shifting some operations to the
front without delaying others. Active schedules contain no idle
time, and no operation can be finished earlier without delaying
other operations. Nondelay schedules are active schedules, in
359
Fig. 1. Relationship of schedule properties.
which operations are placed into the schedule such that the
machine idle time is minimized and that no machine is kept
idle if some operations can be processed. Their relationships
[31] are shown in Fig. 1. The optimal schedule is guaranteed
to be an active schedule. Therefore, we only need to find the
optimum solution in the set of active schedules.
III. R EPRESENTATION AND I NITIAL
S CHEDULE G ENERATION
A. Representation
Before solving the JSSP, we describe the proper represen-
tation for the solution of the problem, namely, a scheduling,
which is used in the later algorithms. In this paper, an operation-
based representation is adopted, which uses an unpartitioned
permutation with m-repetitions of job numbers for problems
with n jobs and m machines. A job represents a set of opera-
tions that has to be scheduled on m machines. In this formula-
scanning the permutation from left to right, the kth occurrence
of a job number refers to the kth operation in the technological
sequence of this job. A permutation with repetition of job
numbers only expresses the order in which the operations of
jobs are scheduled.
For example, suppose that a sequence is given as (2 1 3 4 2 4
3 2 1 2 3 3 1 1 4 4) in a 4 jobs × 4 machines problem, in which
each gene stands for one operation. Each job consists of four
operations, and the job number is thereby repeated four times.
The fifth gene of the permutation implies the second operation
of job 2 because number 2 has been repeated twice. Similarly,
the eighth gene represents the third operation of job 2, and so
on. The prominent advantage is that the permutation is always
feasible. Moreover, it eliminates the deadlock schedules that are
incompatible with the technological constraints and can never
be finished. However, it will produce redundancy in the search
space and will cause the search-space size to expand to (n ×
m)!/(m!)n , i.e., the mapping relation between sequences and
schedules is many-to-one.
B. Initial Schedule Generation
A good initial solution is fundamental for the computational
performance of a search algorithm. If the initial population is
generated randomly, the generation of the optimal schedule not
only requires longer time but also decreases the possibility to
obtain an optimal solution. In this paper, a new scheduling
initialization algorithm is proposed based on the well-known
360 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART A: SYSTEMS AND HUMANS, VOL. 38, NO. 2, MARCH 2008
algorithm of Giffler and Thompson [32] to produce active
schedules. The brief outline of the algorithm is as follows.
Step 1) Let set A contain the first schedulable operation of
each job. Let sjm = 0, for all operations (j, m) in
A, where sjm is the earliest time at which operations
(j, m) can start.
Step 2) Calculate t(A) = min(sjm + pjm ), for all opera-
tions (j, m) ∈ A, where pjm is the processing time
of operations (j, m).
Step 3) Set up set M , for all operations (j, m) ∈ A, if sjm <
t(A), and then put machine m into set M .
Step 4) Set up set G, randomly select a machine m∗ from
M for all operations (j, m) ∈ A, and put operation
(j, m) into set G if it is processed on machine m∗ .
Step 5) For all operations (j, m∗ ) ∈ G, calculate the earliest
completed time of job j if operation (j, m∗ ) is
currently processed. Let j ∗ denote the job that is
completed last.
Step 6) Select operation (j ∗ , m∗ ) from G, and append it to
the schedule.
Step 7) Delete operation (j ∗ , m∗ ) from A, and then subjoin
its immediate successor into A.
Step 8) Update sjm in A, and then return to Step 2) until A
is empty, namely, all operations are scheduled.
According to the algorithm proposed by Giffler and
Thompson, the operation with an early start time and a mini-
mum processing time possesses a high priority to be scheduled.
In our algorithm, besides the aforementioned rule, we also
consider the degree of the effect on the makespan when a
schedulable operation is delayed in the current schedule set.
Therefore, we first need to calculate the earliest finishing time
of each job in the current schedule set and find the job with
the longest finishing time. The effect on the makespan is great
when its corresponding current operation is delayed. Thus, the
corresponding current operation of the job has a high priority to
be scheduled just as Step 5) stated.
IV. PSO-B ASED S CHEDULING A LGORITHM
PSO, originally developed by Kennedy and Eberhart [33],
is a method for optimizing hard numerical functions on the
metaphor of social behaviors of flocks of birds and schools
of fish. It is an evolutionary computation technique based on
swarm intelligence. A swarm consists of individuals, called
particles, which change their positions over time. Each particle
represents a potential solution to the problem. In a PSO sys-
tem, particles fly around in a multidimensional search space.
During its flight, each particle adjusts its position according
to its own experience and the experience of its neighboring
particles, making use of the best position encountered by itself
and its neighbors. The effect is that particles move toward the
better solution areas while still having the ability to search a
wide area around the better solution areas. The performance
of each particle is measured according to a predefined fitness
function, which is related to the problem being solved. PSO
has been found to be robust and fast in solving nonlinear,
nondifferentiable, and multimodal problems. The mathematical
description and executive steps of the PSO are as follows.
Let the ith particle in a D-dimensional space be repre-
sented as Xi = (xi1 , . . . , xid , . . . , xiD ). The best previous po-
sition of the ith particle is recorded and represented as Pi =
(pi1 , . . . , pid , . . . , piD ), which gives the best fitness value and
is also called “pbest.” The index of the best pbest among
all particles is represented by symbol g. Location Pg is also
called “gbest.” The velocity for the ith particle is represented
as Vi = (νi1 , . . . , νid , . . . , νiD ). The concept of PSO consists
of changing the velocity and location of each particle toward its
pbest and gbest locations according to the following equations
at each time step:
νid = wνid + c1 r1 (pid − xid ) + c2 r2 (pgd − xid ) (5)
xid = xid + νid (6)
where w is the inertia coefficient that is a constant in the interval
[0, 1], c1 and c2 are the learning rates that are nonnegative
constants, r1 and r2 are generated randomly in the interval
[0, 1], νid ∈ [−νmax , νmax ], and νmax is the designated max-
imum velocity.
The conventional PSO cannot be directly applied to the JSSP.
In this section, we describe the formulations of the proposed
PSO algorithm for the JSSP. First, the concept of the difference
of the locations is extended. Let us present the similarity
measure of two particles. Denote the ith and jth particles in
a D-dimensional space as Xi = (xi1 , . . . , xid , . . . , xiD ) and
Xj = (xj1 , . . . , xjd , . . . , xjD ), respectively. Define functions

1, if xik = xjk

D
s(k) = and S(Xi , Xj ) = s(k) (7)
0, if xik = xjk
k=1
where S(Xi , Xj ) is called the similarity measure between
particles Xi and Xj . Let f (Xi ) denote the fitness of particle
i and assume that 0 ≤ f (Xi ) ≤ C, ∀i ∈ {1, 2, . . . , n}, where n
is the population size. The difference of the locations between
two particles (namely, “distance”) is redefined by the following
equation:
dis(Xi − Xj ) = k · [α · |f (Xi ) − f (Xj )| /C
+ β · (D − S(Xi , Xj )) /D] (8)
where D is the dimension of a particle; k is a positive integer
that is called the acceleration coefficient; and α and β are two
positive weights, which can be ascertained by trial and error and
satisfy the relation that the sum of α and β is equal to one. In
this paper, α and β are taken as 0.7 and 0.3, respectively. It is
obvious that 0 ≤ |f (Xi ) − f (Xj )|/C ≤ 1 and that 0 ≤ (D −
S(Xi , Xj ))/D ≤ 1.
Correspondingly, the concept of velocity is also extended.
Velocity is defined as the time of “adjustment operation.” The
brief outline of the adjustment algorithm is as follows.
Let X = (x1 , . . . , xk , . . . , xD ) and Y = (y1 , . . . , yk ,
. . . , yD ) be the two particles in a D-dimensional space.
Step 1) Randomly select an index k of location, and set
indicator m = 0 if xk = yk = s, where s is the
number on location k. Go to Step 2); else, if xk =
yk , namely, xk = s and yk = s, go to Step 3).
GE et al.: EFFECTIVE PSO AND AIS-BASED HYBRID INTELLIGENT ALGORITHM
Step 2) Scan sets X  = {xi |1 ≤ i < k} and Y  = {yi |1 ≤
i < k} from left to right to find out the times that
s appears, and denote them as X  _times(s) = tx
and Y  _times(s) = ty , respectively. If tx > ty , go
to Step 4); if tx < ty , go to Step 5); in addition, if
tx = ty , go to Step 6).
Step 3) Randomly select a location index j in the particle Y ,
which satisfies yj = s and yj = xj . Swap yj and yk ,
set indicator m = 1, and then go to Step 2).
Step 4) Swap s, which appears after location k, and yj ,
which satisfies that yj = xj , yj = s, and j < k until
tx = ty , and then go to Step 7).
Step 5) Swap s, which appears in front of location k, and yj ,
which satisfies that yj = xj , yj = s, and j > k until
tx = ty , and then go to Step 7).
Step 6) If m = 0, randomly reselect an index k, whereas if
m = 1, go to Step 7).
Step 7) Terminate.
Using “⊕” to denote the adjustment operation, the proposed
PSO algorithm could be performed by the following equations:
νid = int [wνid +c1 r1 dis(pid −xid )+c2 r2 dis(pgd −xid )] (9)
xid = xid ⊕ νid (10)
where int[·] represents the truncation function, and dis(·) can
be calculated using (8).
In this paper, the parameters are taken as w = 0.5, c1 = 1.8,
and c2 = 1.0.
V. AIS-B ASED S CHEDULING A LGORITHM
AIS is rapidly emerging, which is inspired by theoretical
immunology and observed immune functions, principles, and
models. An immune system is a naturally occurring event-
response system that can quickly adapt to changing situations.
The efficient mechanisms of an immune system, including
clonal selection, learning ability, memory, robustness and flexi-
bility, make AISs useful in many application fields. AIS appears
to offer powerful and robust information processing capabilities
for solving complex problems. In this section, a new AIS-based
scheduling algorithm is proposed. The proposed algorithm is
built on the principles of clonal selection, affinity maturation,
and the abilities of learning and memory.
A. Clonal Selection
Clonal-selection probability is a direct proportion to anti-
body affinity: The higher the affinity an antibody has with an
antigen, the higher the selection chance and the clonal rate.
Therefore, the proportional model is adopted in this paper. It is
a direct-ratio selection strategy and can be used to select a new
population according to the direct ratio with respect to fitness
values. First, calculate the sum fsum of affinity values of all the
antibodies in the population, and then generate a pseudorandom
number m in the interval [0, fsum ] by the multiplicative congru-
ential method. Last, sum up the affinity values one by one from
the first antibody until the accumulated value is not smaller than
m, and the last accumulated antibody is the cloned one.
361
Fig. 2. Example of vaccination.
B. Vaccination and Mutation
In this section, a novel vaccination operation is proposed.
Vaccination shows how strongly we benefit from the ability
of our immune system to show an improved reaction after
a previous contact with the same or a very similar pathogen
(or infectious agent) or parts of it. It is constantly helping us
in our defense against the omnipresent enemies attacking our
health. The regulatory mechanisms of the immune system make
modulation of the immune response to antigens toward those
responses that are protective against the pathogen, whether
antibody-based or cell-mediated. We take full advantage of
some characteristic information and knowledge in the process
of solving problem to distill vaccines and then vaccinate some
antibodies, similarly to the techniques of vaccine inoculation.
The process of vaccination is designed as follows. First, the
antibody with the highest affinity is recognized, which is called
here the best antibody, and then an antibody is selected for
vaccination. Produce a vector of length j × m for the problem
of j jobs and m machines, which is randomly filled with
elements of set {0, 1}. This vector defines the order in which the
genes of the newly produced antibody molecule are drawn from
the best and selected antibodies. After a gene is drawn from one
antibody and deleted from the other one, it is appended to the
newly produced antibody molecule. This step is repeated until
both the best and selected antibody molecules are empty and the
produced antibody contains all the genes involved. An offspring
is created by using an operator and is accepted into the next
population if the affinity value is higher than the original. Fig. 2
shows an example of the vaccination.
In immune systems, random changes take place in the
variable-region genes of antibody molecules. These random
changes are called mutations. Mutations cause structurally
different antibody molecules. In AIS for solving the JSSP,
the number of mutational genes in an antibody molecule is
inversely proportional to the antibody affinity. The higher the
affinity an antibody has with an antigen, the smaller the mu-
tation bits. The number of mutational genes in an antibody
molecule is decided by the following formula:
 
(fmax − f )(ρ − η)
bit = int +η (11)
fmax − fmin
where bit is the number of mutational genes, int[·] is the
truncation function, f is the affinity of mutational antibody,
fmax and fmin are the maximal and minimal affinities in the
362 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART A: SYSTEMS AND HUMANS, VOL. 38, NO. 2, MARCH 2008

population, respectively, and ρ and η are the upper and lower TABLE I
EXAMPLE FOR 3 JOBS × 2 MACHINES
bounds of mutation bits, respectively, which are adjustable
integers. Mutation operations are completed by selecting bit
positions from the antibody molecule and randomly permuting
the genes on these positions. The mutated antibody replaces its
original regardless of its fitness value.

C. Receptor Editing
Due to the random nature of mutation processes, a large
proportion of mutating genes become nonfunctional or develop
into harmful antiself specificities. Those cells are eliminated
by a programmed death process that is known as receptor
editing. The proposed receptor-editing model embodies the two Fig. 3. Gantt chart of semiactive scheduling.
operations of antibody introduction and gene shift.
If there is no improvement of the highest affinity degree for
a certain number of generations, the two operations are per-
formed. The antibody introduction is that a certain percentage
of antibodies are randomly produced by the proposed initializa-
tion algorithm in Section III and replace the worst antibodies of
the whole population. The process of gene shift is described as
follows. Randomly select some antibodies. For every selected Fig. 4. Gantt chart of active scheduling.
antibody, randomly select a gene of the antibody molecule.
Make it move backward in turn, and once shift one position
until it moves λ times and then λ new antibodies are produced.
We replace the original antibody by the produced antibody with
the highest affinity if it is better than the original one.

D. AIS-Based Scheduling Algorithm

The brief outline of the proposed algorithm based on AIS can
be described as follows.
Step 1) Initialize pop_size antibodies as an initial popula-
tion by using the proposed initialization algorithm,
where pop_size denotes the population size.
Step 2) Select m antibodies from the population by the
proportional selection model and clone them to a
clonal library.
Step 3) Perform the mutation operation for each of the anti-
bodies in the clonal library.
Step 4) Randomly select s antibodies from the clonal library Fig. 5. Flowchart of the hybrid algorithm for the JSSP.
to perform the operation of vaccination.
Step 5) Replace the worst s antibodies in the population by scheduling such that
the best s antibodies from the clonal library.
Step 6) Perform the operation of receptor editing if there is min (T (JM )) = min {max [T (1), T (2),. . ., T (i),. . ., T (m)]}
no improvement of the highest affinity degree for a (12)
certain number of generations G. where T (i) is the final completion time of machining on the ith
Step 7) Stop if the termination condition is satisfied; else, machine, and T (JM ) is the final completion time of all jobs.
repeat Steps 2)–7). Fitness and affinity are evaluated by using the following
In this paper, the parameters are taken as pop_size = 50, equation:
m = 30, s = 10, and G = 80.
fi = 100 × opt/Ti (JM ) (13)

where fi , which is in interval (0, 100], is the fitness value of

VI. HIA B ASED ON THE P ROPOSED PSO AND AIS
ith particle in PSO and is also the affinity value of ith antibody
Based on the models of the proposed PSO and AIS, the HIA in AIS, and opt is the theoretical optimal makespan for a given
is integrated to solve the JSSP. The objective is to search a problem.
GE et al.: EFFECTIVE PSO AND AIS-BASED HYBRID INTELLIGENT ALGORITHM
TABLE II
COMPARISONS OF RESULTS BETWEEN THE HIA AND OTHER APPROACHES
The value of the objective function T (JM ) can be obtained
by the process of decoding. The makespan is produced by the
process that assigns operations to the machines at their earliest
possible starting time by the technological order of each job,
scanning the permutation from left to right. It should be noticed
that the scheduling that is acquired this way is only a semiactive
one. Yet, the optimal solution must be an active schedule. Then,
the active decoding is applied, which checks the possible blank
time interval before appending an operation at the last position
and fills the first blank interval before the last operation to
convert the semiactive schedule to an active one so that the
makespan can be shorter. For example, consider the 3 jobs ×
2 machines problem shown in Table I. In the example, job 1
must go to machine 2 for one unit of time, then to machine 1 for
two units of time, and so on. Suppose that an operation-based
363
solution is the sequence a = (1, 3, 2, 2, 1, 3). Its Gantt chart
by the semiactive decoding scheme is shown in Fig. 3, whose
makespan is seven units. On the other hand, the makespan by
the active decoding is six units, and the corresponding Gantt
chart is shown in Fig. 4.
It is worth mentioning that fitness and affinity are as pivotal
to the guidance of the search and clonal selection because the
chance of a solution being chosen is determined solely by its ob-
jective function value. Thus, their values are linearly adjusted to
avoid early convergence and to ensure the variety of the popula-
tion. The adjustment process can be summarized as follows.
Step 1) Calculate the average fitness and affinity fave ,
the maximal fmax and the minimal fmin in the
population.
364 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART A: SYSTEMS AND HUMANS, VOL. 38, NO. 2, MARCH 2008

TABLE II
(Continued.) COMPARISONS OF RESULTS BETWEEN THE HIA AND OTHER APPROACHES

Step 2) If fmin > 2fave − fmax , go to Step 3); else, go to

Step 4).
TABLE III Step 3) Calculate coefficients α = (fave /fmax − fave ) and
AVERAGE EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS USING THE HIA
β = ((fmax − 2fave )fave /fmax − fave ). Go to
Step 5).
Step 4) Calculate coefficients α = (fave /fave − fmin ) and
β = (−fmin fave /fave − fmin ). Go to Step 5).
Step 5) Calculate the new fitness value by using the equation
f  = αf + β.

The flowchart of the hybrid algorithm is shown in Fig. 5.

Furthermore, the proposed algorithm stops if the best obtained
solution equals to the best known makespan or if, for a given
number cnt of generations, there has been no improvement
of the best solution found so far, where cnt = 20 000. The
GE et al.: EFFECTIVE PSO AND AIS-BASED HYBRID INTELLIGENT ALGORITHM
Fig. 6. Representative convergence curve for FT10.
advantage of the proposed hybrid algorithm is that it can
produce quite satisfactory solutions of the test problems in a
reasonable time. On the one hand, the proposed PSO model
has the ability to approximate the quasi-optimum solution very
fast; on the other hand, the proposed AIS model has the ability
to escape from local minimum.
VII. N UMERICAL S IMULATION
R ESULTS AND C OMPARISONS
The performance of the proposed HIA for the JSSP is
examined by using some test problems taken from the OR-
Library [34]. We consider 43 instances from two classes of
standard JSSP test problems: instances FT06, FT10, and FT20
that are designed by Fisher and Thompson (1963) and instances
LA01–LA40 that are designed by Lawrence (1984). Numerical
experiments are performed in C++ language on a PC with
Pentium IV 1.4-GHz processor and 256-MB memory. Numer-
ical results are compared with those reported in some existing
literature works using other approaches [29], [30], [35]–[44],
including some heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms.
Table II summarizes the results of the experiments. The
contents of the table include the name of each test problem
(Instance), the scale of the problem (Size), the value of the
best known solution for each problem (BKS), the value of the
best solution found by using the proposed algorithm (HIA),
the number of running generations (Iterations), the percentage
of the deviation with respect to the best known solution (RD%),
and the best results reported in other research works. It is worth
mentioning that the makespan listed in the table is the best
obtained from five executions by inching the defined fitness
function (13), which is changed according to the following
equation:
fi = 100 × (opt ± δ)/Ti (JM ) (14)
where δ is the tuning parameter, and its values are taken as
zero, one, and two. The proposed algorithm produces quite
satisfactory solutions in reasonable amount of iterations by
tuning only the parameter δ.
From the table, it can be seen that the proposed algorithm
is able to find the best known solution for 32 instances, i.e., in
about 75% of the instances, and the deviation of the minimum
365
Fig. 7. Convergence curves for different values of the parameter δ.
found makespan from the best known solution is only on
average 0.28%. The proposed algorithm yields a significant
improvement in solution quality with respect to almost all
other algorithms, except for the approach proposed by Nowicki
and Smutnicki that has a better performance in the 15 × 15
problems mainly. The superior results indicate the successful
incorporation of the improved PSO and AIS, which facilitates
the escape from local minimum points and increases the possi-
bility of finding a better solution. Therefore, it can be concluded
that the proposed HIA solves the JSSP fairly efficiently.
As aforementioned, the algorithm is performed five times
for every test problem by taking the parameter δ as zero, one,
and two. Table III lists the mean solutions (Mean), the relative
deviation of the mean solution (MRD), the standard deviation
of the solutions (SD), the best solution (Best), and the relative
deviation of the best solution (BRD). The MRD is commonly
zero for small-size problem and is not more than 2% for most
other problems.
To illustrate the simulated results more intuitively, the no-
torious FT10 problem is specifically described as an example,
in which there are numerous local optima so that the problem
is challenging enough. Fig. 6 shows the representative conver-
gence curve finding the best solution. To investigate the effect
of δ-tuning on the solution quality and convergence, Fig. 7
shows a group of convergence curves for different values of the
parameter δ. Fig. 8 shows the Gantt chart of the best solution.
Define the utilization percentage of the ith machine as
Pi
Ui = × 100% (15)
Ii + Pi
where Pi is the total processing time of machine i, and Ii is
the total idle time of machine i before the last operation in the
machine is processed. Fig. 9 shows the percentage of utilization
of each machine.
Let Di denote the blank interval between makespan and the
finish time of the last operation completed in the machine i,
which is called here the dormancy time of machine i. Then
Di + Ii + Pi = makespan ∀i ∈ {1, 2, . . . , M } (16)
where M is the number of machines.
366 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART A: SYSTEMS AND HUMANS, VOL. 38, NO. 2, MARCH 2008

Fig. 8. Gantt chart of an optimal schedule for FT10.

Fig. 9. Column chart of percentage of utilization. Fig. 10. Pie chart of percentage of different times.

The percentages of the total processing, idle, and dormancy

times for all the machines are calculated, respectively, by G&T algorithm is proposed to produce the initial population
 in the PSO and AIS. The proposed hybrid algorithm effectively
Pi exploits the capabilities of distributed and parallel computing
P% =  i
× 100% (17) of swarm intelligence approaches. The algorithm is tested on
(Di + Ii + Pi ) a set of 43 standard instances taken from the OR-Library.
i
 Computational results are compared with those obtained using
Ii other existing approaches, and the proposed approach yields
I% =  i
× 100% (18) significant improvement in solution quality. The superior re-
(Di + Ii + Pi )
i sults indicate the successful incorporation of the two improved
 swarm intelligence approaches. The investigation on further
Di
study for the theoretical research, as well as the performance
D% =  i
× 100%. (19) of the technique, is in progress. One of the important issues
(Di + Ii + Pi )
i is to extend the proposed algorithm so that it can be applied
to more practical and integrated manufacturing problems such
The aforementioned percentages are shown in Fig. 10.
as dynamic arrivals, machine breakdown, or other factors that
affect job status over time.
VIII. C ONCLUSION
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Hong-Wei Ge received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in
mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in computer appli-
cation technology from Jilin University, Changchun,
China, in 2000, 2003, and 2006, respectively.
He is currently a Postdoctor with the School of
Information Science and Engineering, East China
University of Science and Technology, Shanghai,
China. His current research interests include com-
putational intelligence, optimization and modeling,
system control, and bioinformatics. He has published
more than 30 papers in these areas. His research was
featured in Computers and Structures, the Journal Nonlinear Analysis: Real
World Applications, and Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
Liang Sun received the B.S. degree in computer sci-
ence and technology from Xidian University, Xi’an,
China, and the M.S. degree in computer application
technology from Jilin University, Changchun, China,
in 2003 and 2006, respectively, where he is currently
working toward the Ph.D. degree in the College of
Computer Science and Technology.
His current research interests include computa-
tional intelligence and bioinformatics.
368 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART A: SYSTEMS AND HUMANS, VOL. 38, NO. 2, MARCH 2008

Yan-Chun Liang received the Ph.D. degree in me- Feng Qian received the Ph.D. degree in automation
chanics from Jilin University, Changchun, China, from East China University of Science and Technol-
in 1993. ogy, Shanghai, in 1995.
He is currently a Professor with the College of He is currently a Professor with the Automation
Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University Department, East China University of Science and
and a Visiting Professor with the Institute of High Technology. His current research interests include
Performance Computing, Singapore. He is a recip- control theory and application, industry instrument
ient of several grants, such as the National Science automation, and chemistry engineering. He has pub-
Foundation of China, etc. His research interests in- lished more than 100 papers in these areas.
clude the theory and applications of computational
intelligence, bioinformatics, etc. He has published
over 160 papers. His research was featured in the Journal of Micromechan-
ics and Microengineering, the Physical Review E, the Neural Computing &
Applications, and the Journal Applied Artificial Intelligence.
Dr. Liang is the Chair of many conferences and is on the editorial board of
several journals.