Hyper-Heuristic Approaches for the Travelling Thief Problem

The Travelling Thief Problem (TTP) is a relatively new combinatorial optimization problem that combines the two well known combinatorial optimization problems: the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and the Knapsack Problem (KP). The two subproblems are combined such that optimal solutions for the individual subproblems do not imply an optimal solution for the overall problem. On the other hand, hyper-heuristic approaches are generic approaches used in optimization problems. They repeatedly select a heuristic from a predefined set of low-level heuristics (operators) and apply it to a solution to generate an improved one. In this paper, four single point selection hyper-heuristic approaches are applied to the Travelling Thief Problem. The applied approaches give comparable results to the state-of-the-art approaches proposed in the literature.