Genetic programming hyperheuristic parameter configuration using fitness landscape analysis

Abstract

Fitness landscape analysis is a tool that can help us gain insight into a problem, determine how hard it is to solve a problem using a given algorithm, choose an algorithm for solving a given problem, or choose good algorithm parameters for solving the problem. In this paper, fitness landscape analysis of hyperheuristics is used for clustering instances of three scheduling problems. After that, good parameters for tree-based genetic programming that can solve a given scheduling problem are calculated automatically for every cluster. Additionally, we introduce tree editing operators which help in the calculation of fitness landscape features in tree based genetic programming. A heuristic is proposed based on introduced operators, and it calculates the distance between any two trees. The results show that the proposed approach can obtain parameters that offer better performance compared to manual parameter selection.