Multiple strings planing problem in maritime service network: Hyper-heuristic approach

The service network design problems arising in liner shipping industry are very intractable problems. Several exact method are proposed for such problems where almost all of them are limited by the instance size that can be resolved. In this article, we consider the problem of designing multiple strings among a set of ports, in order to maximize the industry profit. In this work, we develop hyper-heuristics by proposing different low level heuristics categorized as constructive, improvement, perturbation etc. The low level heuristics are guided by a meta-heuristic algorithm that is supported by data mining techniques to attain balancing between intensification and diversification strategies in choosing the best heuristics series to be applied.