HOPHS: A hyperheuristic that solves orienteering problem with hotel selection

Abstract

We present a hyperheuristic approach designed to solve a real world problem: the Orienteering Problem with Hotel Selection (OPHS). This problem has recently been introduced as an extension of the well-known Orienteering Problem. In this problem, hotels must be selected from a pool of available hotels. Each trip starts and ends in one of the hotels. The goal is to maximize the total score computed by the sum of the score of the trips to the visit points of interest. We propose a hyperheuristic that is based on a hill-climbing procedure. The low-level heuristics have been selected focused on the different constraints of the problem. We have put special attention on the collaboration among the low-level heuristics, in order to guide the algorithm to the most promising areas, considering both the time constraints and the improvement of the score. We use the benchmarks instances including the hardest ones of the problem for testing. The results show that our technique is a very effective one in terms of the design and the quality of the solution found.