A hyper-heuristic inspired by pearl hunting

Abstract

Pearl hunting is a traditional way of diving to retrieve pearl from pearl oysters or to hunt some other sea creatures. In some areas, hunters need to dive and search seafloor repeatedly at several meters depth for pearl oysters. In a search perspective, pearl hunting consists of repeated diversification (to surface and change target area) and intensification (to dive and find pearl oysters). A Pearl Hunter (PHunter) hyper-heuristic is inspired by the pearl hunting, as shown in Fig. 1. Given a problem domain and some low-level heuristics (LLHs), PHunter can group, test, select and organize LLHs for the domain by imitating a rational diver.