Event Details

CENTRAL Seminar

Real-world routing and scheduling problems are often characterised by complex operational constraints, dynamic decision environments and competing business objectives that make exact optimisation impractical. Hyper-heuristics offer a higher-level search methodology that aims to automate the selection and coordination of problem-specific heuristics, reducing the need for extensive manual algorithm design while maintaining strong solution quality. This talk presents the application of selection hyper-heuristics to industrial routing and scheduling problems, with a focus on large-scale inventory routing and logistics operations. Using a real-world case study from the industrial gas distribution sector, I will demonstrate how sequence-based hyper-heuristics can learn effective combinations of low-level heuristics during the search process and adapt their behaviour according to observed performance.