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This paper introduces a heuristic framework for the Best Secretary Problem, where one item must be selected using rank information only. We develop five data-responsive rules extending classical fixed-cutoff methods: an expected-record…
In this paper, we describe the hyper-parameter search problem in the field of machine learning and present a heuristic approach in an attempt to tackle it. In most learning algorithms, a set of hyper-parameters must be determined before…
In a facility with front room and back room operations, it is useful to switch workers between the rooms in order to cope with changing customer demand. Assuming stochastic customer arrival and service times, we seek a policy for switching…
Hyper-heuristics are a novel tool. They deal with complex optimization problems where standalone solvers exhibit varied performance. Among such a tool reside selection hyper-heuristics. By combining the strengths of each solver, this kind…
Cross-domain selection hyper-heuristics aim to distill decades of research on problem-specific heuristic search algorithms into adaptable general-purpose search strategies. In this respect, existing selection hyper-heuristics primarily…
Production systems use heuristics because they are faster or scale better than their optimal counterparts. Yet, practitioners are often unaware of the performance gap between a heuristic and the optimum or between two heuristics in…
To solve complex real-world problems, heuristics and concept-based approaches can be used in order to incorporate information into the problem. In this study, a concept-based approach called variable functioning Fx is introduced to reduce…
Potential heuristics for state-space search are defined as weighted sums over simple state features. Atomic features consider the value of a single state variable in a factored state representation, while binary features consider joint…
Search-based methods for hard combinatorial optimization are often guided by heuristics. Tuning heuristics in various conditions and situations is often time-consuming. In this paper, we propose NeuRewriter that learns a policy to pick…
Given a malfunctioning system, sequential diagnosis aims at identifying the root cause of the failure in terms of abnormally behaving system components. As initial system observations usually do not suffice to deterministically pin down…
Spatial puzzles composed of rigid objects, flexible strings and holes offer interesting domains for reasoning about spatial entities that are common in the human daily-life's activities. The goal of this work is to investigate the automated…
State-space search with explicit abstraction heuristics is at the state of the art of cost-optimal planning. These heuristics are inherently limited, nonetheless, because the size of the abstract space must be bounded by some, even if a…
We describe how to convert the heuristic search algorithm A* into an anytime algorithm that finds a sequence of improved solutions and eventually converges to an optimal solution. The approach we adopt uses weighted heuristic search to find…
Recent work investigated the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for the synthesis of heuristic guidance to improve the performance of temporal planners when a domain is fixed and a set of training problems (not plans) is given. The idea is…
We argue that results produced by a heuristic optimisation algorithm cannot be considered reproducible unless the algorithm fully specifies what should be done with solutions generated outside the domain, even in the case of simple box…
The personnel scheduling problem is a well-known NP-hard combinatorial problem. Due to the complexity of this problem and the size of the real-world instances, it is not possible to use exact methods, and thus heuristics, meta-heuristics,…
The two standard branching schemes for CSPs are d-way and 2-way branching. Although it has been shown that in theory the latter can be exponentially more effective than the former, there is a lack of empirical evidence showing such…
This paper presents a new framework for anytime heuristic search where the task is to achieve as many goals as possible within the allocated resources. We show the inadequacy of traditional distance-estimation heuristics for tasks of this…
Many sequential decision-making problems can be formulated as shortest-path problems, where the objective is to reach a goal state from a given starting state. Heuristic search is a standard approach for solving such problems, relying on a…
Heuristics are a central component of deterministic planning, particularly in domain-independent settings where general applicability is prioritized over task-specific tuning. This work revisits that paradigm in light of recent advances in…