abstract = "Hyper-heuristic approaches aim to automate heuristic
design in order to solve multiple problems instead of
designing tailor-made methodologies for individual
problems. Hyper-heuristics accomplish this through a
high level heuristic (heuristic selection mechanism and
an acceptance criterion). This automates heuristic
selection, deciding whether to accept or reject the
returned solution. The fact that different problems or
even instances, have different landscape structures and
complexity, the design of efficient high level
heuristics can have a dramatic impact on
hyper-heuristic performance. In this work, instead of
using human knowledge to design the high level
heuristic, we propose a gene expression programming
algorithm to automatically generate, during the
instance solving process, the high level heuristic of
the hyper-heuristic framework. The generated heuristic
takes information (such as the quality of the generated
solution and the improvement made) from the current
problem state as input and decides which low level
heuristic should be selected and the acceptance or
rejection of the resultant solution. The benefit of
this framework is the ability to generate, for each
instance, different high level heuristics during the
problem solving process. Furthermore, in order to
maintain solution diversity, we use a memory mechanism
which contains a population of both high quality and
diverse solutions that is updated during the problem
solving process. The generality of the proposed
hyper-heuristic is validated against six well known
combinatorial optimisation problem, with very different
landscapes, provided by the HyFlex software. Empirical
results comparing the proposed hyper-heuristic with
state of the art hyper-heuristics, conclude that the
proposed hyper-heuristic generalises well across all
domains and achieves competitive, if not superior,
results for several instances on all domains.",
notes = "N. R. Sabar is with Data Mining and Optimisation
Research Group (DMO), University Kebangsaan Malaysia,
UKM Bangi 43600, Selangor, Malaysia, and also with the
University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, Jalan Broga,
Semenyih 43500, Selangor, Malaysia.