A genetic programming hyper-heuristic for the multidimensional knapsack problem

Drake, John H.; Hyde, Matthew; Khaled, Ibrahim; �zcan, Ender

Abstract

Purpose: 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. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the suitability of using genetic programming as a hyper-heuristic methodology to generate constructive heuristics to solve the multidimensional 0-1 knapsack problem. Design/methodology/approach: Early hyper-heuristics focused 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. A population of heuristics to rank knapsack items are trained on a subset of test problems and then applied to unseen instances. Findings: The results over a set of standard benchmarks show that genetic programming can be used to generate constructive heuristics which yield human-competitive results. Originality/value: In this work the authors show that genetic programming is suitable as a method to generate reusable constructive heuristics for the multidimensional 0-1 knapsack problem. This is classified as a hyper-heuristic approach as it operates on a search space of heuristics rather than a search space of solutions. To our knowledge, this is the first time in the literature a GP hyper-heuristic has been used to solve the multidimensional 0-1 knapsack problem. The results suggest that using GP to evolve ranking mechanisms merits further future research effort. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Citation

Drake, J. H., Hyde, M., Khaled, I., & Özcan, E. (2014). A genetic programming hyper-heuristic for the multidimensional knapsack problem. Kybernetes, 43(9/10), https://doi.org/10.1108/K-09-2013-0201

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Mar 11, 2014
• Deposit Date: Mar 10, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 10, 2016
• Journal: Kybernetes
• Print ISSN: 0368-492X
• Electronic ISSN: 0368-492X
• Publisher: Emerald
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 43
• Issue: 9/10
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/K-09-2013-0201
• Keywords: Artificial intelligence, genetic programming, heuristic generation, hyper-heuristics, multidimensional knapsack problem
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/725255
• Publisher URL: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/K-09-2013-0201