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HyFlex: A Benchmark Framework for Cross-Domain Heuristic Search

  • Gabriela Ochoa
  • Matthew Hyde
  • Tim Curtois
  • Jose A. Vazquez-Rodriguez
  • James Walker
  • Michel Gendreau
  • Graham Kendall
  • Barry McCollum
  • Andrew J. Parkes
  • Sanja Petrovic
  • Edmund K. Burke
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 7245)

Abstract

This paper presents HyFlex, a software framework for the development of cross-domain search methodologies. The framework features a common software interface for dealing with different combinatorial optimisation problems and provides the algorithm components that are problem specific. In this way, the algorithm designer does not require a detailed knowledge of the problem domains and thus can concentrate his/her efforts on designing adaptive general-purpose optimisation algorithms. Six hard combinatorial problems are fully implemented: maximum satisfiability, one dimensional bin packing, permutation flow shop, personnel scheduling, traveling salesman and vehicle routing. Each domain contains a varied set of instances, including real-world industrial data and an extensive set of state-of-the-art problem specific heuristics and search operators. HyFlex represents a valuable new benchmark of heuristic search generality, with which adaptive cross-domain algorithms are being easily developed and reliably compared.This article serves both as a tutorial and a as survey of the research achievements and publications so far using HyFlex.

Keywords

Problem Domain Search Operator Variable Neighborhood Search Iterate Local Search Local Search Heuristic 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  • Gabriela Ochoa
    • 1
  • Matthew Hyde
    • 1
  • Tim Curtois
    • 1
  • Jose A. Vazquez-Rodriguez
    • 1
  • James Walker
    • 1
  • Michel Gendreau
    • 2
  • Graham Kendall
    • 1
  • Barry McCollum
    • 3
  • Andrew J. Parkes
    • 1
  • Sanja Petrovic
    • 1
  • Edmund K. Burke
    • 4
  1. 1.School of Computer ScienceUniversity of NottinghamUK
  2. 2.CIRRELTUniversity of MontrealCanada
  3. 3.School of Electronics and Computer ScienceQueen’s UniversityUK
  4. 4.Department of Computing Science and MathematicsUniversity of StirlingUK

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