Distributed hyper-heuristics for real parameter optimization

  • Authors:
  • Marco Biazzini;Balazs Banhelyi;Alberto Montresor;Mark Jelasity

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Trento, Trento, Italy;University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary;University of Trento, Trento, Italy;University of Szeged and Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Szeged, Hungary

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 11th Annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Hyper-heuristics (HHs) are heuristics that work with an arbitrary set of search operators or algorithms and combine these algorithms adaptively to achieve a better performance than any of the original heuristics. While HHs lend themselves naturally for distributed deployment, relatively little attention has been paid so far on the design and evaluation of distributed HHs. To our knowledge, our work is the first to present a detailed evaluation and comparison of distributed HHs for real parameter optimization in an island model. Our set of test functions includes well-known benchmark functions and two realistic space-probe trajectory optimization problems. The set of algorithms available to the HHs include several variants of differential evolution, and uniform random search. Our main conclusion is that some of the simplest HHs are surprisingly successful in a distributed environment, and the best HHs we tested provide a robust and stable good performance over a wide range of scenarios and parameters.