Multi-objective Optimisation of a Water Distribution Network with a Sequence-based Selection Hyper-heuristic

Abstract

Multi-objective hyper-heuristics are fast becoming an efficient way of optimising complex problems. The water distribution network design problem is an example of such a problem, and this work employs a recent hyper-heuristic that generates sequences of low-level heuristics to solve the multi-objective water distribution design problem. The results presented are comparable to those generated by state-of-the-art metaheuristics, as well as a single-objective version of the algorithm from the literature. The information revealed from analysing the sequences generated to solve the problem reveal important information about the nature of the problem space that is not available from the metaheuristics, and the entire Pareto front can be explored in a single run as opposed to the multiple runs needed with the original single-objective algorithm.