The CODeS Research Group is CHeSC'2011 Winner
The CODeS Research Group recently won an international research competition, i.e. "Cross-domain Heuristic Search Challenge (CHeSC'2011)".
Our algorithm outperformed 19 other competing methods from all over the world.
The first Cross-domain Heuristic Search Challenge seeks to bring together practitioners from operational research, computer science and artificial intelligence who are interested in developing more generally applicable methodologies. The challenge is to design a high level search strategy that controls a set of problem specific low level heuristics. The set of low level heuristics will be different for each problem domain, but the high level strategy which controls the heuristics must remain the same.
DESCRIPTION OF THE CHALLENGE
This challenge differs from other competitions in search and optimisation, as it aims to measure performance over several problem domains rather than just one problem domain. Currently, the HyFlex framework provides the following six test domains:
- Boolean Satisfiability (MAX-SAT)
- One Dimensional Bin Packing
- Permutation Flow Shop
- Personnel Scheduling (see also the Staff Rostering Benchmark Data Sets)
- Traveling Salesman (Hidden domain)
- Vehicle Routing (Hidden domain)
For the competition, five instances from each of these six test domains are selected.
DESCRIPTION OF THE WINNING ALGORITHM
The winning algorithm is a new selection hyper-heuristic providing several adaptive features to cope with the requirements of managing different heuristic sets. The approach suggested provides an intelligent way of selecting heuristics, determines effective heuristic pairs and adapts the parameters of certain heuristics online. In addition, an adaptive list-based threshold accepting mechanism was developed. It enables deciding whether to accept the solutions generated by the selected heuristics or not.
Our team is composed of: Mustafa Misir, prof. Patrick De Causmaecker, Greet Vanden Berghe, Katja Verbeeck
Competition webpage
Competitions results
