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Hyper-heuristics operate at the level above traditional (meta-)heuristics that ‘optimise the optimiser’. These algorithms can combine low level heuristics to create bespoke algorithms for particular classes of problems. The lowlevel heuristics can be mutation operators or hill climbing algorithms and can include industry expertise. This paper investigates the use of a new hyper-heuristic basedon sequence analysis in the biosciences, to develop new optimisers that can outperform conventional evolutionary approaches. It demonstrates that the new algorithms develop high quality solutions on benchmark water distribution network optimisation problems efficiently, and can yield important information about the problem search space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A square matrix of distinct numbers in which every row, column and both diagonals have the same total is referred to as a magic square. Constructing a magic square of a given order is considered a difficult computational problem, particularly when additional constraints are imposed. Hyper-heuristics are emerging high-level search methodologies that explore the space of heuristics for solving a given problem. In this study, we present a range of effective selection hyper-heuristics mixing perturbative low-level heuristics for constructing the constrained version of magic squares. The results show that selection hyper-heuristics, even the non-learning ones deliver an outstanding performance, beating the best-known heuristic solution on average. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Educational timetabling problem is a challenging real world problem which has been of interest to many researchers and practitioners. There are many variants of this problem which mainly require scheduling of events and resources under various constraints. In this study, a curriculum based course timetabling problem at Yeditepe University is described and an iterative selection hyper-heuristic is presented as a solution method. A selection hyper-heuristic as a high level methodology operates on the space formed by a fixed set of low level heuristics which operate directly on the space of solutions. The move acceptance and heuristic selection methods are the main components of a selection hyper-heuristic. The proposed hyper-heuristic in this study combines a simulated annealing move acceptance method with a learning heuristic selection method and manages a set of low level constraint oriented heuristics. A key goal in hyper-heuristic research is to build low cost methods which are general and can be reused on unseen problem instances as well as other problem domains desirably with no additional human expert intervention. Hence, the proposed method is additionally applied to a high school timetabling problem, as well as six other problem domains from a hyper-heuristic benchmark to test its level of generality. The empirical results show that our easy-to-implement hyper-heuristic is effective in solving the Yeditepe course timetabling problem. Moreover, being sufficiently general, it delivers a reasonable performance across different problem domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]