An apprenticeship learning hyper-heuristic for vehicle routing in HyFlex
Apprenticeship learning occurs via observations while an expert is in action. A hyper-heuristic is a search method or a learning mechanism that controls a set of low level heuristics or combines different heuristic components to generate heuristics for solving a given computationally hard problem. I...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Conference or Workshop Item |
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2014
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| Online Access: | https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/34399/ |
| Summary: | Apprenticeship learning occurs via observations while an expert is in action. A hyper-heuristic is a search method or a learning mechanism that controls a set of low level heuristics or combines different heuristic components to generate heuristics for solving a given computationally hard problem. In this study, we investigate into a novel apprenticeship learning-based approach which is used to automatically generate a hyper-heuristic for vehicle routing. This approach itself can be considered as a hyper-heuristic which operates in a train and test fashion. A state-of-the-art hyper-heuristic is chosen as an expert which is the winner of a previous hyper-heuristic competition. Trained on small vehicle routing instances, the learning approach yields various classifiers, each capturing different actions that the expert hyper-heuristic performs during the search process. Those classifiers are then used to produce a hyper-heuristic which is potentially capable of generalizing the actions of the expert hyperheuristic while solving the unseen instances. The experimental results on vehicle routing using the Hyper-heuristic Flexible (HyFlex) framework shows that the apprenticeship-learning based hyper-heuristic delivers an outstanding performance when compared to the expert and some other previously proposed hyper-heuristics. |
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