An Immune Evolutionary Approach for the Label Printing Problem

In this short paper, the label printing problem (LPP) is investigated. The LPP can be formulated as a nonlinear integer programming problem and it aims to minimize the total wastage of labels under a fixed number of templates with subject to the minimal required quantities of various labels. Since the LPP is NP-hard and its feasible region is pretty large, it is usually difficult to solve. In this short paper, based upon a novel coding scheme, we apply an effective immune based evolutionary algorithm (IA) to solve the LPP. Numerical results show that the IA performs well for all test problems. Moreover, some best solutions by the applied IA are superior to the best well known solutions in the literature.