A genetic programming hyper-heuristic for the multidimensional knapsack problem

Hyper-heuristics are a class of high-level search techniques which operate on a search space of heuristics rather than directly on a search space of solutions. Early hyperheuristics focussed on selecting and applying a low-level heuristic at each stage of a search. Recent trends in hyper-heuristic research have led to a number of approaches being developed to automatically generate new heuristics from a set of heuristic components. This work investigates the suitability of using genetic programming as a hyper-heuristic methodology to generate constructive heuristics to solve the multidimensional 0-1 knapsack problem. A population of heuristics to rank knapsack items are trained on a subset of test problems and then applied to unseen instances. The results over a set of standard benchmarks show that genetic programming can be used to generate constructive heuristics which yield human-competitive results.