A Memetic Algorithm with a Novel Repair Heuristic for the Multiple-Choice Multidimensional Knapsack Problem

Abstract

We propose a memetic algorithm for the multiple-choice multidimensional knapsack problem (MMKP). In this study, we focus on finding good solutions for the MMKP instances, for which feasible solutions rarely exist. To find good feasible solutions, we introduce a novel repair heuristic based on the tendency function and a genetic search for the function approximation. Even when the density of feasible solutions over the entire solution space is very low, the proposed repair heuristic could successfully change infeasible solutions into feasible ones. Based on the proposed repair heuristic and effective local search, we designed a memetic algorithm that performs well on problem instances with a low density of feasible solutions. By performing experiments, we could show the superiority of our method compared with previous genetic algorithms. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.