Author:

Keywords:

hyper-heuristic, HyFlex, ITEC

Abstract:

Reusability is a desired feature for search and optimisation strategies. Low-level, problem-dependent search mechanisms are far from being used on different problems while keeping them unchanged. Meta-heuristics have been employed for taking the heuristic design process to a higher level and for facilitating reusability. These approaches have been usually conceived as heuristic methods that need to be implemented and adapted with regard to the characteristics of the goal problem. Thus, the resulting algorithms are still problem-dependent and hard to apply to other problems. Hyper-heuristics take the search process into the heuristic level and manage the heuristic set instead of directly solving a problem. During this management process, any problem-dependent data exchange between hyper-heuristics and problems is disallowed. Although any knowledge about the problems is absent for the hyper-heuristics, the generality of hyper-heuristics has not been examined extensively. In a recently proposed high level framework, HyFlex, it is easy to test the generality of hyper-heuristics. HyFlex provides a set of problems with a number of instances as well as a group of low-level heuristics. In this study, the design process of a hyper-heuristic upon HyFlex will be discussed. A performance analysis based on the experimental results will be carried out.