Automatic Design of Specialized Variation Operators for the Multi-Objective Quadratic Assignment Problem Academic Article in Scopus uri icon

abstract

  • The development of specialized, domain-specific operators has significantly enhanced the performance of evolutionary algorithms for solving optimization problems. However, creating such operators often requires substantial effort from human experts, making the process slow, resource-intensive, and heavily reliant on domain knowledge. To overcome these limitations, generation hyper-heuristics provide a framework for automating the design of variation operators by evolving combinations of heuristic components without direct expert input. In this work, we propose a generation hyper-heuristic method based on grammatical evolution to automatically design variation operators (crossover and mutation) tailored to the multi-objective quadratic assignment problem (mQAP) - a challenging combinatorial optimization problem with many real-world applications. Using the proposed method, variation operators were generated considering six mQAP instances with two and three objectives, leveraging MOEA/D as a multi-objective optimizer. For validation, the generated operators were evaluated on unseen instances. Our experimental results indicate that the evolved operators enhance the performance of MOEA/D compared to standard crossover operators. Furthermore, the top-performing operator in training did not always generalize best to larger instances, while some lower-ranked operators showed better adaptability. These results highlight the potential of automated operator design in effectively tackling complex optimization problems like the mQAP. © 2025 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.

publication date

  • July 13, 2025