HyFlex: A benchmark framework for cross-domain heuristic search

Citation

Ochoa G, Hyde M, Curtois T, Vazquez-Rodriguez JA, Walker J, Gendreau M, Kendall G, McCollum B, Parkes AJ, Petrovic S & Burke E (2012) HyFlex: A benchmark framework for cross-domain heuristic search. In: Hao J & Middendorf M (eds.) Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization 12th European Conference, EvoCOP 2012, Málaga, Spain, April 11-13, 2012. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 7245. 12th European Conference, EvoCOP 2012, Málaga, Spain, 11.04.2012-12.04.2012. Amsterdam: Springer, pp. 136-147. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-29124-1_12

Abstract
This paper presents HyFlex, a software framework for the development of cross-domain search methodologies. The framework features a common software interface for dealing with different combinatorial optimisation problems and provides the algorithm components that are problem specific. In this way, the algorithm designer does not require a detailed knowledge of the problem domains and thus can concentrate his/her efforts on designing adaptive general-purpose optimisation algorithms. Six hard combinatorial problems are fully implemented: maximum satisfiability, one dimensional bin packing, permutation flow shop, personnel scheduling, traveling salesman and vehicle routing. Each domain contains a varied set of instances, including real-world industrial data and an extensive set of state-of-the-art problem specific heuristics and search operators. HyFlex represents a valuable new benchmark of heuristic search generality, with which adaptive cross-domain algorithms are being easily developed and reliably compared.This article serves both as a tutorial and a as survey of the research achievements and publications so far using HyFlex.

Keywords
; Information management; Information retrieval