An Ant-Based Selection Hyper-heuristic for Dynamic Environments

Dynamic environment problems require adaptive solution methodologies which can deal with the changes in the environment during the solution process for a given problem. A selection hyper-heuristic manages a set of low level heuristics (operators) and decides which one to apply at each iterative step. Recent studies show that selection hyperheuristic methodologies are indeed suitable for solving dynamic environment problems with their ability of tracking the change dynamics in a given environment. The choice function based selection hyper-heuristic is reported to be the best hyper-heuristic on a set of benchmark problems. In this study, we investigate the performance of a new learning hyper-heuristic and its variants which are inspired from the ant colony optimisation algorithm components. The proposed hyper-heuristic maintains a matrix of pheromone intensities (utility values) between all pairs of low level heuristics. A heuristic is selected based on the utility values between the previously invoked heuristic and each heuristic from the set of low level heuristics. The ant-based hyper-heuristic performs better than the choice function and even its improved version across a variety of dynamic environments produced by the Moving Peaks Benchmark generator.