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  • EJOR2016

    Rights statement: This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in European Journal of Operational Research. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in European Journal of Operational Research, 250, 1, 2016 DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2015.09.003

    Accepted author manuscript, 529 KB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

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An iterated multi-stage selection hyper-heuristic

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>1/04/2016
<mark>Journal</mark>European Journal of Operational Research
Issue number1
Volume250
Number of pages14
Pages (from-to)77-90
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date10/09/15
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

There is a growing interest towards the design of reusable general purpose search methods that are applicable to different problems instead of tailored solutions to a single particular problem. Hyper-heuristics have emerged as such high level methods that explore the space formed by a set of heuristics (move operators) or heuristic components for solving computationally hard problems. A selection hyper-heuristic mixes and controls a predefined set of low level heuristics with the goal of improving an initially generated solution by choosing and applying an appropriate heuristic to a solution in hand and deciding whether to accept or reject the new solution at each step under an iterative framework. Designing an adaptive control mechanism for the heuristic selection and combining it with a suitable acceptance method is a major challenge, because both components can influence the overall performance of a selection hyper-heuristic. In this study, we describe a novel iterated multi-stage hyper-heuristic approach which cycles through two interacting hyper-heuristics and operates based on the principle that not all low level heuristics for a problem domain would be useful at any point of the search process. The empirical results on a hyper-heuristic benchmark indicate the success of the proposed selection hyper-heuristic across six problem domains beating the state-of-the-art approach.