Metaheuristic Design Pattern: Visitor for Genetic Operators

Metaheuristics, such as Genetic Algorithms (GAs), and hyper-heuristics have been widely studied and applied in the literature. This led to the development of several frameworks to aid the execution and development of such algorithms. Consequently, the reusability, scalability and maintainability became fundamental points to be attacked by developers. Such points can be improved using Design Patterns, but despite their advantages, few works have explored their usage with metaheuristics and hyper-heuristics. In order to contribute to this research topic, we present a solution based on the Visitor pattern used to design genetic operators. A case study is presented with the Hyper-heuristic for the Integration and Test Order problem (HITO). This case study shows that the proposed solution can increase the reusability of the implemented operators, and also enable easy addition of new genetic operators and representations.