Abstract
HyFlex (Hyper-heuristic Flexible framework) [15] is a software framework enabling the development of domain independent search heuristics (hyper-heuristics), and testing across multiple problem domains. This framework was used as a base for the first Cross-domain Heuristic Search Challenge, a research competition that attracted significant international attention. In this paper, we present one of the problems that was used as a hidden domain in the competition, namely, the capacitated vehicle routing problem with time windows. The domain implements a data structure and objective function for the vehicle routing problem, as well as many state-of- the-art low-level heuristics (search operators) of several types. The domain is tested using two adaptive variants of a multiple-neighborhood iterated local search algorithm that operate in a domain independent fashion, and therefore can be considered as hyper-heuristics. Our results confirm that adding adaptation mechanisms improve the performance of hyper-heuristics. It is our hope that this new and challenging problem domain can be used to promote research within hyper-heuristics, adaptive operator selection, adaptive multi-meme algorithms and autonomous control for search algorithms.
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Walker, J.D., Ochoa, G., Gendreau, M., Burke, E.K. (2012). Vehicle Routing and Adaptive Iterated Local Search within the HyFlex Hyper-heuristic Framework. In: Hamadi, Y., Schoenauer, M. (eds) Learning and Intelligent Optimization. LION 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7219. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34413-8_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34413-8_19
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