Alternative hyper-heuristic strategies for multi-method global optimization

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of meta-heuristics as low-level heuristics in a hyper-heuristic framework. A novel multi-method hyper-heuristic algorithm which makes use of a number of common meta-heuristics is presented. Algorithm performance is evaluated on a diverse set of real parameter benchmark problems and meaningful conclusions are drawn with respect to the selection of alternative low-level heuristics and the acceptance of the obtained solutions within the proposed multi-method meta-heuristic approach.