An Investigation of Selection Hyper-heuristics in Dynamic Environments

Hyper-heuristics are high level methodologies that perform search over the space of heuristics rather than solutions for solving computationally difficult problems. A selection hyper-heuristic framework provides means to exploit the strength of multiple low level heuristics where each heuristic can be useful at different stages of the search. In this study, the behavior of a range of selection hyper-heuristics is investigated in dynamic environments. The results show that hyper-heuristics embedding learning heuristic selection methods are sufficiently adaptive and can respond to different types of changes in a dynamic environment.