Artificial Immune System

Abstract

Artificial Immune System algorithms use antibodies which fully specify the solution of an optimization, learning, or pattern recognition problem. By being restricted to fully specified antibodies, an AIS algorithm can not make use of schemata or classes of partial solutions. This paper presents a symbiotic artificial immune system (SymbAIS) algorithm which is an extension of CLONALG algorithm. It uses partially specified antibodies and gradually builds up building blocks of suitable sub-antibodies. The algorithm is compared with CLONALG on multimodal function optimization and combinatorial optimization problems and it is shown that it can solve problems that CLONALG is unable to solve.