Hyper-heuristics

Abstract

Many practical problems are awkward to solve computationally. Whether you are trying to find any solution at all, or perhaps to find a solution that is optimal or close to optimal according to some criteria, exact methods can be unfeasibly expensive. In such cases it is common to resort to heuristic methods, which are typically derived from experience but are inexact or incomplete. For example, in packing and cutting problems a very simple heuristic might be to try to pack the items in some standardized way starting with the largest remaining one first, on the reasonable grounds that the big ones tend to cause the most trouble. But such heuristics can easily lead to suboptimal answers.