Abstract
Real-world applications of optimisation techniques place more importance on finding approaches that result in acceptable quality solutions in a short time-frame and can provide robust solutions, capable of being modified in response to changes in the environment than seeking elusive global optima. We demonstrate that a hyper-heuristic approach NELLI* that takes inspiration from artifical immune systems is capable of life-long learning in an environment where problems are presented in a continuous stream and change over time. Experiments using 1370 bin-packing problems show excellent performance on unseen problems and that the system maintains memory, enabling it to exploit previously learnt heuristics to solve new problems with similar characteristics to ones solved in the past.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Burke, E.K., Gendreau, M., Hyde, M., Kendall, G., Ochoa, G., Ozcan, E., Qu, R.: Hyper-heuristics: A survey of the state of the art. J. Oper. Res. Soc. (July 2013)
Burke, E.K., Hyde, M.R., Kendall, G., Woodward, J.: Automating the packing heuristic design process with genetic programming. Evol. Comput. 20(1), 63–89 (2012)
Falkenauer, E.: A hybrid grouping genetic algorithm for bin packing. Journal of Heuristics 2, 5–30 (1996)
Garrido, P., Riff, M.C.: Collaboration between hyperheuristics to solve strip-packing problems. In: Melin, P., Castillo, O., Aguilar, L.T., Kacprzyk, J., Pedrycz, W. (eds.) IFSA 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4529, pp. 698–707. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Gent, I.P.: Heuristic solution of open bin packing problems. Journal of Heuristics 3(4), 299–304 (1998)
Jackson, D.: Single node genetic programming on problems with side effects. In: Coello, C.A.C., Cutello, V., Deb, K., Forrest, S., Nicosia, G., Pavone, M. (eds.) PPSN 2012, Part I. LNCS, vol. 7491, pp. 327–336. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Maturana, J., Lardeux, F., Saubion, F.: Autonomous operator management for evolutionary algorithms. Journal of Heuristics 16, 881–909 (2010)
Michalewicz, Z.: Ubiquity symposium: Evolutionary computation and the processes of life: The emperor is naked: Evolutionary algorithms for real-world applications. Ubiquity 2012(November), 3:1–3:13 (2012)
Remde, S., Cowling, P., Dahal, K., Colledge, N., Selensky, E.: An empirical study of hyperheuristics for managing very large sets of low level heuristics. J. Oper. Res. Soc. 63(3), 392–405 (2012)
Ross, P., Schulenburg, S., Marin-Blazquez, J.G., Hart, E.: Hyper-heuristics: Learning to combine simple heuristics in bin-packing problems. In: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2002, pp. 942–948 (2002)
Scholl, A., Klein, R., Jürgens, C.: Bison: a fast hybrid procedure for exactly solving the one-dimensional bin packing problem. Comput. Oper. Res. 24(7), 627–645 (1997)
Silver, D., Yang, Q., Li, L.: Lifelong machine learning systems: Beyond learning algorithms. AAAI Spring Symposium Series (2013)
Sim, K., Hart, E., Paechter, B.: A lifelong learning hyper-heuristic method for bin packing. Evolutionary Computation Journal (in press, January 2014)
Sim, K., Hart, E.: Generating single and multiple cooperative heuristics for the one dimensional bin packing problem using a single node genetic programming island model. In: Blum, C. (ed.) GECCO 2013: Proceeding of the Fifteenth Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, ACM, New York (2013)
Sim, K., Hart, E.: An improved immune inspired hyper-heuristic for combinatorial optimisation problems. In: GECCO 2014: Proceeding of the Sixteenth Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (in press, 2014)
Sim, K., Hart, E., Paechter, B.: A hyper-heuristic classifier for one dimensional bin packing problems: Improving classification accuracy by attribute evolution. In: Coello, C.A.C., Cutello, V., Deb, K., Forrest, S., Nicosia, G., Pavone, M. (eds.) PPSN 2012, Part II. LNCS, vol. 7492, pp. 348–357. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Sim, K., Hart, E., Paechter, B.: Learning to solve bin packing problems with an immune inspired hyper-heuristic. In: Advances in Artificial Life, ECAL 2013: Proceedings of the Twelfth European Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, pp. 856–863. MIT Press (2013)
Thabtah, F., Cowling, P.: Mining the data from a hyperheuristic approach using associative classification. Expert Systems with Applications 34(2), 1093–1101 (2008)
Trojanowski, K., Wierzchon, S.T.: Immune-based algorithms for dynamic optimization. Information Sciences 179(10), 1495–1515 (2009)
Whitbrook, A.M., Aickelin, U., Garibaldi, J.M.: Two-timescale learning using idiotypic behaviour mediation for a navigating mobile robot. Appl. Soft Comput. 10(3), 876–887 (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hart, E., Sim, K. (2014). On the Life-Long Learning Capabilities of a NELLI*: A Hyper-Heuristic Optimisation System. In: Bartz-Beielstein, T., Branke, J., Filipič, B., Smith, J. (eds) Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XIII. PPSN 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8672. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10762-2_28
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10762-2_28
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-10761-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10762-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)