Hyper-heuristics: A survey and taxonomy

Hyper-heuristics are search techniques for selecting, generating, and sequencing (meta)-heuristics to solve challenging optimization problems. They differ from traditional (meta)-heuristics methods, which primarily employ search space-based optimization strategies. Due to the remarkable performance of hyper-heuristics in multi-objective and machine learning-based optimization, there has been an increasing interest in this field. With a fresh perspective, our work extends the current taxonomy and presents an overview of the most significant hyper-heuristic studies of the last two decades. Four categories under which we analyze hyper-heuristics are selection hyper-heuristics (including machine learning techniques), low-level heuristics, target optimization problems, and parallel hyper-heuristics. Future research prospects, trends, and prospective fields of study are also explored.