Harmony Search-Based Hyper-Heuristic For Scheduling Problems
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Date
2018-04
Authors
Anwar, Khairul
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Abstract
Scheduling problems are encountered in every field which are typically
related to services such as in hospital, transportation, and also educational
institutions. These problems can be extremely difficult when its involves a large
number of events or resources to be scheduled and a wide variety of constraints
which need to be satisfied or taken into consideration. Hence, many heuristic and
meta-heuristic approaches have been introduced to solve these problems. However,
some institutions look for a method that can deal with a wide range of scheduling
problems without spending a lot of money and times as long the solutions produced
are acceptable. For this reason, the hyper-heuristic approach have been introduced.
The motivation of using hyper-heuristics is to produce a general method that can be
used to solve different scheduling problems. Therefore, this research proposes a new
alternative heuristic selection mechanism in a hyper-heuristic framework named
Harmony Search-based Hyper-heuristic (HSHH). The original idea was to apply a
sequence of low-level heuristics to a selected solution in order to produce good
quality solutions to a given problem. Three main op-erators in harmony search
algorithm: memory consideration, random consideration, and pitch adjustment
were combined as high-level heuristics in order to select and generate a sequence of
improvements low-level heuristics. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the method,
the proposed method was tested with three different scheduling problems (two
examination timetabling problems and one nurse rostering problem) taken from the
real world. The results produced by the proposed methods were compared with those
of other selection perturbative hyper-heuristic methods working on the same datasets.
Experimentally, the HSHH approach had achieved comparable re-sults and in several
instances was able to produce competitive results.
Description
Keywords
Hyper-heuristics is to produce a general method , used to solve different scheduling problems