Automatic Design of Metaheuristics for Practical Engineering Applications

It is common to find multiple metaheuristics to solve continuous optimization problems. However, choosing what optimizer may obtain the best results for a given task requires exhaustive evaluations that are highly application-dependent. Besides, it is necessary to find sufficiently good tuning parameters to achieve satisfactory performance with the selected approach. In this context, the automatic design of algorithms, particularly those based on heuristics, has been increasing in popularity in the previous years due to its undoubted relevance nowadays. This paper explores a novel approach based on hyper-heuristics to carefully select population-based search operators and their tuning parameters to generate metaheuristics capable of dealing with a given practical engineering problem. The proposed strategy is assessed using three highly relevant and illustrative problems: training Artificial Neural Networks, designing PID controllers, and modeling a calorimetric phenomenon based on fractional calculus. In addition, we implement three well-known optimization metaheuristics to compare achieved solutions via the proposed hyper-heuristic strategy, namely Particle Swarm Optimization, Genetic Algorithm, and Cuckoo Search. Results from extensive numerical tests prove that the customized metaheuristics are generally superior to the three well-known algorithms, taking only a few iterations to converge to an optimal solution. This is an excellent indicator of alleviating the effort and expertise required to choose the proper methodology when dealing with real-valued optimization problems.