Choice Function and Random Hyperheuristics

A hyperheuristic is a high-level heuristic which adaptively controls the combination of several low-level knowledgepoor heuristics so that while using only cheap and easyto-implement low-level heuristics, we may achieve solution quality approaching that of an expensive knowledgerich approach. Hyperheuristics have been successfully applied by the authors to three real-world problems of personnel scheduling. In this paper, the low-level behaviour of the choice-function based hyperheuristic is investigated and compared with a range of other heuristics and hyperheuristics. We show that the choice-function hyperheuristic makes an effective and realistic combination of the lowlevel heuristics at hand. Furthermore the combination of the low-level heuristics is intelligently adapted to both the problem being solved and the region of the search space currently being explored.