Hyper-heuristic approaches for the dynamic generalized assignment problem


Kiraz B., TOPCUOĞLU H. R.

2010 10th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications, ISDA'10, Cairo, Egypt, 29 November - 01 December 2010, pp.1487-1492, (Full Text) identifier

  • Publication Type: Conference Paper / Full Text
  • Doi Number: 10.1109/isda.2010.5687121
  • City: Cairo
  • Country: Egypt
  • Page Numbers: pp.1487-1492
  • Keywords: Dynamic environments, Generalized assignment problem, Heuristics
  • Marmara University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

The generalized assignment problem is a well-known NP-complete problem whose objective is to find a minimum cost assignment of a set of jobs to a set of agents by considering the resource constraints. Dynamic instances of the generalized assignment problem can be created by changing the resource consumptions, capacity constraints and costs of jobs. Memory-based approaches are among a set of evolutionary techniques that are proposed for dynamic optimization problems. On the other hand, a hyper-heuristic is a high-level method which decides an appropriate low-level heuristic to apply on a given problem without using problem-specific information. In this paper, we present the applicability of hyper-heuristic methods for the dynamic generalized assignment problem. Our technique extends a memory-based approach by integrating it with various hyper-heuristics for the search population. Experimental evaluation performed on various benchmark instances indicates that our hyper-heuristic based approaches outperform the memory-based technique with respect to quality of solutions. © 2010 IEEE.