A selection hyper-heuristic for scheduling deliveries of ready-mixed concrete

The existence of several solution strategies for different search and optimisation problems motivates the use of these strategies in a collaborative way. These collaborative approaches are considered in the context of hybridisation. Hyper-heuristics provide hybridisation by performing search on multiple low-level heuristics for finding efficient solutions in a problem-independent manner. In this study, a suite of simple moves is employed to solve real world instances of the ready-mixed concrete delivery problem. These basic moves are used under a selection hyper-heuristic that makes use of the new adaptive iteration limited list-based threshold accepting with a fixed limit and four others for comparison. These hyper-heuristics are tested on a set of real world ready-mixed concrete delivery problem instances and a performance analysis is carried out.