HeurEvo: Agentic Evolution of Hybrid Solver-Augmented Heuristics for Time-Critical Mathematical Optimization

Feijie Wu, Hugo Barbalho, Konstantina Mellou, Marco Molinaro, Jing Gao +3

Recent advances in agentic heuristic design use AI agents and execution feedback to automate algorithm discovery for challenging optimization problems. In many practical settings, high-quality solutions must be obtained under strict runtime constraints, motivating hybrid approaches that combine problem-specific heuristics with powerful mathematical programming solvers. However, existing approaches typically improve heuristic components within predefined procedures or tune solver configurations in isolation. This limits holistic adaptation of where to allocate computation, how to leverage solvers, and how to refine the overall algorithmic structure. To address these limitations, we propose HeurEvo, an automated plan--code--component co-evolution framework that jointly evolves the high-level algorithmic structures, their implementations, and a shared pool of reusable components. A planner determines which algorithmic components to use, how to combine them, and how to allocate runtime across stages, a coder realizes the resulting plan as executable code, while a component evolver updates the shared component pool. Within an island-based evolutionary framework, plans and…