Hyper-heuristics, grammatical evolution and the capacitated vehicle routing problem

A common problem when applying heuristics is that they often perform well on some problem instances, but poorly on others. We develop a hyper-heuristic approach, using Grammatical Evolution (GE), to generate heuristics for the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). Through a series of experiments we develop an approach that leads to solutions of acceptable quality to Vehicle Routing Problem instances with only limited prior knowledge of the problem to be solved.