Makespan minimization on parallel processors: an immune-based approach

This work deals with the problem of scheduling jobs to identical parallel processors with the goal of minimizing the completion time of the last processor to finish its execution (makespan). This problem is known to be NP-Hard. The algorithm proposed here is inspired by the immune systems of vertebrate animals. The advantage of combinatorial optimization algorithms based on artificial immune systems is the inherent ability to preserve a diverse set of near-optimal solutions along the search. The results produced by the method are compared with results of classical heuristics.