Automatic Handling of expert knowledge using artificial immune systems applied to combinatorial optimization problems

This paper presents a methodology that reduces computing time of combinatorial optimization problems that can be applied to any population based algorithm such as: genetic algorithms, artificial immune systems, ant colony optimization, etc. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed methodology an Artificial Immune System was used since we used concepts derived from this paradigm. The proposed methodology was applied to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and it is introduced the concept of vaccination to reduce cities in the TSP. It is able to work practically with any optimization population based method in order to obtain optimal and suboptimal routes of the original problem. Comparative experimental results of several experiments with large number of cities (711 cities) are shown.