A hyper-heuristic approach with dynamic decision blocks for inter-cell scheduling

In this paper, the inter-cell scheduling problem with a transportation capacity constraint is analyzed. An ant colony optimization (ACO)-based hyper-heuristic with dynamic decision blocks is proposed, which selects appropriate heuristic rules for production and transportation simultaneously. On the basis of traditional hyper-heuristics, a dynamic decision block strategy is proposed, in which several entities are grouped into a decision block under the guidance of pheromones, and appropriate heuristic rules are selected for each decision block. Comparisons between the proposed method and other hyper-heuristics with different decision block strategies are conducted. Computational results show a satisfying performance of the proposed method in minimizing total weighted tardiness with less computational costs.