A novel population-based local search for nurse rostering problem

Population-based approaches regularly are better than single based (local search) approaches in exploring the search space. However, the drawback of population-based approaches is in exploiting the search space. Several hybrid approaches have proven their efficiency through different domains of optimization problems by incorporating and integrating the strength of population and local search approaches. Meanwhile, hybrid methods have a drawback of increasing the parameter tuning. Recently, population-based local search was proposed for a university course-timetabling problem with fewer parameters than existing approaches, the proposed approach proves its effectiveness. The proposed approach employs two operators to intensify and diversify the search space. The first operator is applied to a single solution, while the second is applied for all solutions. This paper aims to investigate the performance of population-based local search for the nurse rostering problem. The INRC2010 database with a dataset composed of 69 instances is used to test the performance of PB-LS. A comparison was made between the performance of PB-LS and other existing approaches in the literature. Results show good performances of proposed approach compared to other approaches, where population-based local search provided best results in 55 cases over 69 instances used in experiments

A case study of controlling crossover in a selection hyper-heuristic framework using the multidimensional knapsack problem

Hyper-heuristics are high-level methodologies for solving complex problems that operate on a search space of heuristics. In a selection hyper-heuristic framework, a heuristic is chosen from an existing set of low-level heuristics and applied to the current solution to produce a new solution at each point in the search. The use of crossover low-level heuristics is possible in an increasing number of general-purpose hyper-heuristic tools such as HyFlex and Hyperion. However, little work has been undertaken to assess how best to utilise it. Since a single-point search hyper-heuristic operates on a single candidate solution, and two candidate solutions are required for crossover, a mechanism is required to control the choice of the other solution. The frameworks we propose maintain a list of potential solutions for use in crossover. We investigate the use of such lists at two conceptual levels. First, crossover is controlled at the hyper-heuristic level where no problem-specific information is required. Second, it is controlled at the problem domain level where problem-specific information is used to produce good-quality solutions to use in crossover. A number of selection hyper-heuristics are compared using these frameworks over three benchmark libraries with varying properties for an NP-hard optimisation problem: the multidimensional 0-1 knapsack problem. It is shown that allowing crossover to be managed at the domain level outperforms managing crossover at the hyper-heuristic level in this problem domain. © 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technolog

An improved Ant Colony System for the Sequential Ordering Problem

It is not rare that the performance of one metaheuristic algorithm can be improved by incorporating ideas taken from another. In this article we present how Simulated Annealing (SA) can be used to improve the efficiency of the Ant Colony System (ACS) and Enhanced ACS when solving the Sequential Ordering Problem (SOP). Moreover, we show how the very same ideas can be applied to improve the convergence of a dedicated local search, i.e. the SOP-3-exchange algorithm. A statistical analysis of the proposed algorithms both in terms of finding suitable parameter values and the quality of the generated solutions is presented based on a series of computational experiments conducted on SOP instances from the well-known TSPLIB and SOPLIB2006 repositories. The proposed ACS-SA and EACS-SA algorithms often generate solutions of better quality than the ACS and EACS, respectively. Moreover, the EACS-SA algorithm combined with the proposed SOP-3-exchange-SA local search was able to find 10 new best solutions for the SOP instances from the SOPLIB2006 repository, thus improving the state-of-the-art results as known from the literature. Overall, the best known or improved solutions were found in 41 out of 48 cases.Comment: 30 pages, 8 tables, 11 figure

Hyper-heuristic decision tree induction

A hyper-heuristic is any algorithm that searches or operates in the space of heuristics as opposed to the space of solutions. Hyper-heuristics are increasingly used in function and combinatorial optimization. Rather than attempt to solve a problem using a fixed heuristic, a hyper-heuristic approach attempts to find a combination of heuristics that solve a problem (and in turn may be directly suitable for a class of problem instances). Hyper-heuristics have been little explored in data mining. This work presents novel hyper-heuristic approaches to data mining, by searching a space of attribute selection criteria for decision tree building algorithm. The search is conducted by a genetic algorithm. The result of the hyper-heuristic search in this case is a strategy for selecting attributes while building decision trees. Most hyper-heuristics work by trying to adapt the heuristic to the state of the problem being solved. Our hyper-heuristic is no different. It employs a strategy for adapting the heuristic used to build decision tree nodes according to some set of features of the training set it is working on. We introduce, explore and evaluate five different ways in which this problem state can be represented for a hyper-heuristic that operates within a decisiontree building algorithm. In each case, the hyper-heuristic is guided by a rule set that tries to map features of the data set to be split by the decision tree building algorithm to a heuristic to be used for splitting the same data set. We also explore and evaluate three different sets of low-level heuristics that could be employed by such a hyper-heuristic. This work also makes a distinction between specialist hyper-heuristics and generalist hyper-heuristics. The main difference between these two hyperheuristcs is the number of training sets used by the hyper-heuristic genetic algorithm. Specialist hyper-heuristics are created using a single data set from a particular domain for evolving the hyper-heurisic rule set. Such algorithms are expected to outperform standard algorithms on the kind of data set used by the hyper-heuristic genetic algorithm. Generalist hyper-heuristics are trained on multiple data sets from different domains and are expected to deliver a robust and competitive performance over these data sets when compared to standard algorithms. We evaluate both approaches for each kind of hyper-heuristic presented in this thesis. We use both real data sets as well as synthetic data sets. Our results suggest that none of the hyper-heuristics presented in this work are suited for specialization – in most cases, the hyper-heuristic’s performance on the data set it was specialized for was not significantly better than that of the best performing standard algorithm. On the other hand, the generalist hyper-heuristics delivered results that were very competitive to the best standard methods. In some cases we even achieved a significantly better overall performance than all of the standard methods

Grammar-based generation of variable-selection heuristics for constraint satisfaction problems

We propose a grammar-based genetic programming framework that generates variable-selection heuristics for solving constraint satisfaction problems. This approach can be considered as a generation hyper-heuristic. A grammar to express heuristics is extracted from successful human-designed variable-selection heuristics. The search is performed on the derivation sequences of this grammar using a strongly typed genetic programming framework. The approach brings two innovations to grammar-based hyper-heuristics in this domain: the incorporation of if-then-else rules to the function set, and the implementation of overloaded functions capable of handling different input dimensionality. Moreover, the heuristic search space is explored using not only evolutionary search, but also two alternative simpler strategies, namely, iterated local search and parallel hill climbing. We tested our approach on synthetic and real-world instances. The newly generated heuristics have an improved performance when compared against human-designed heuristics. Our results suggest that the constrained search space imposed by the proposed grammar is the main factor in the generation of good heuristics. However, to generate more general heuristics, the composition of the training set and the search methodology played an important role. We found that increasing the variability of the training set improved the generality of the evolved heuristics, and the evolutionary search strategy produced slightly better results