Saurabh Paul, Christos Boutsidis, et al.
JMLR
For hard optimization problems, it is difficult to design heuristic algorithms which exhibit uniformly superior performance for all problem instances. As a result it becomes necessary to tailor the algorithms based on the problem instance. In this paper, we introduce the use of a cooperative problem solving team of heuristics that evolves algorithms for a given problem instance. The efficacy of this method is examined by solving six difficult instances of a bicriteria sparse multiple knapsack problem. Results indicate that such tailored algorithms uniformly improve solutions as compared to using predesigned heuristic algorithms.