A GA-based method to produce generalized hyper-heuristics for the 2D-regular cutting stock problem

The idea behind hyper-heuristics is to discover some combination of straightforward heuristics to solve a wide range of problems. To be worthwhile, such combination should outperform the single heuristics. This paper presents a GA-based method that produces general hyper-heuristics that solve two-dimensional cutting stock problems. The GA uses a variable-length representation, which evolves combinations of condition-action rules producing hyper-heuristics after going through a learning process which includes training and testing phases. Such hyper-heuristics, when tested with a large set of benchmark problems, produce outstanding results (optimal and near-optimal) for most of the cases. The testbed is composed of problems used in other similar studies in the literature. Some additional instances of the testbed were randomly generated.