abstract = "Hyper-heuristics are a class of high-level search
techniques which operate on a search space of
heuristics rather than directly on a search space of
solutions. Early hyperheuristics focused on selecting
and applying a low-level heuristic at each stage of a
search. Recent trends in hyper-heuristic research have
led to a number of approaches being developed to
automatically generate new heuristics from a set of
heuristic components. This work investigates the
suitability of using genetic programming as a
hyper-heuristic methodology to generate constructive
heuristics to solve the multidimensional 0-1 knapsack
problem. A population of heuristics to rank knapsack
items are trained on a subset of test problems and then
applied to unseen instances. The results over a set of
standard benchmarks show that genetic programming can
be used to generate constructive heuristics which yield
human-competitive results.",