An evolutionary algorithm based hyper-heuristic framework for the set packing problem

Abstract

In recent years, hyper-heuristics have received massive attention from the research community as an alternative of meta-heuristics. In a hyper-heuristic, generation or selection of an effective heuristic among a pool of heuristics is an important and challenging task in the search process. At each iteration, a suitable heuristic can take the search process toward the global optimal solution. Moreover, some additional factors such as quality and the number of heuristics also affect the performance. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary algorithm based hyper-heuristic framework that incorporates dynamic selection of parameters. To test its generality, effectiveness and robustness, we apply this approach on two different NP-hard problems - set packing problem (SPP) and minimum weight dominating set (MWDS) problem. The proposed approach for the SPP and the MWDS problem has been evaluated respectively on their respective set of benchmark instances. Computational results show that the proposed approach for the SPP and MWDS problem perform much better than their respective state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the solution quality and computational time.