An Immune Algorithm for the integration of process planning and scheduling

Process planning may generate several feasible process plans for each job in flexible manufacturing environment. To get the global optimality, it is necessary to integrate the process planning with scheduling. An integration model for process planning and scheduling is proposed in this paper. On the basis of natural immune theory, an Immune Algorithm (IA) is presented to solve the integration problem. The algorithm is based on clonal selection and affinity maturation for finding optimal solutions. To demonstrate the efficiency of the IA, some numerical experiments are carried out and analysed. The experiment results show that the process planning and scheduling problems may be effectively solved simultaneously using the proposed IA approach.