An investigation of a hyperheuristic genetic algorithm applied to a trainer scheduling problem

Abstract

This paper investigates a genetic algorithm based hyperheuristic (hyper-GA) for scheduling geographically distributed training staff and courses. The aim of the hyper-GA is to evolve a good-quality heuristic for each given instance of the problem and use this to find a solution by applying a suitable ordering from a set of low-level heuristics. Since the user only supplies a number of low-level problem-specific heuristics and an evaluation function, the hyperheuristic can easily be reimplemented for a different type of problem, and we would expect it to be robust across a wide range of problem instances. We show that the problem can be solved successfully by a hyper-GA, presenting results for four versions of the hyper-GA as well as a range of simpler heuristics and applying them to five test data set.