The main hypothesis of the project is that hyper-heuristic methods can be effectively utilised to automatically generate high quality relocation rules for various types of container relocation problems. The main novelty in this project would be in the application of hyper-heuristic approaches not only to a new problem, but rather to a completely new class of problems, for which they were not yet considered (except in the preliminary study). Unlike for other problems, most notably scheduling problems, where various hyper-heuristic methods have been proposed to consider different scheduling environments, the goal in this project would be to use a common hyper-heuristic for as many problem variants of the container relocation problem as possible. As such, the goal is to find and propose a general hyper-heuristic method and guidelines for its application to the many variants of the considered problem. Another innovative concept of the project would be the investigation of different methods that can be applied to improve the performance of hyper-heuristic methods in the design of relocation rules. Although the focus of the project is the container relocation problem, some of the researched methods should be general enough and applicable to other problem types as well. This could also lead to the improvement of the performance of hyper-heuristics in other areas, which could then broaden the research impact of the project.
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