Hyperheuristics: A Tool for Rapid Prototyping in Scheduling and Optimisation

The term hyperheuristic was introduced by the authors as a high-level heuristic that adaptively controls several low-level knowledgepoor heuristics so that while using only cheap, easy-to-implement low-level heuristics, we may achieve solution quality approaching that of an expensive knowledge-rich approach. For certain classes of problems, this allows us to rapidly produce effective solutions, in a fraction of the time needed for other approaches, and using a level of expertise common among non-academic IT professionals. Hyperheuristics have been successfully applied by the authors to a real-world problem of personnel scheduling. In this paper, the authors report another successful application of hyperheuristics to a rather different real-world problem of personnel scheduling occuring at a UK academic institution. Not only did the hyperheuristics produce results of a quality much superior to that of a manual solution but also these results were produced within a period of only three weeks due to the savings resulting from using the existing hyperheuristic software framework.