Plug-and-Play Hyper-heuristics: An Extended Formulation

Hyper-heuristics is a very active field that is developing all the time. This area of bio-inspired intelligent systems covers a wide range of algorithms selection techniques. This type of self-organising mechanism uses heuristics to optimise heuristics. Many discussions focus on the quality of solutions of the problems obtained from the hyper-heuristics, very little discussion concentrates on the generated algorithms themselves. Some hyper-heuristic frameworks tend to be highly constrained, their limited instruction sets prevent the state-of-the-art algorithms from being expressed. In addition, often the generated algorithms are not human-readable. In this paper, we propose a possible extension of some existing hyper-heuristic formulations, so that some of the current open issues can be addressed and it becomes possible to produce self-organizing heuristics that adapt themselves automatically to the environment when the class of problems changes. This together with the analysis of the evolved algorithms, may lead to human-competitive results.