Metaheuristics have gained great success in academia and practice because
their search logic can be applied to any problem with available solution
representation, solution quality evaluation, and certain notions of locality.
Manually designing metaheuristic algorithms for solving a target problem is
criticized for being laborious, error-prone, and requiring intensive
specialized knowledge. This gives rise to increasing interest in automated
design of metaheuristic algorithms. With computing power to fully explore
potential design choices, the automated design could reach and even surpass
human-level design and could make high-performance algorithms accessible to a
much wider range of researchers and practitioners. This paper presents a broad
picture of automated design of metaheuristic algorithms, by conducting a survey
on the common grounds and representative techniques in terms of design space,
design strategies, performance evaluation strategies, and target problems in
this field