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Highlights• An evolutionary algorithm based hyper-heuristic is proposed for the set packing problem (SPP) and the minimum weight dominating set (MWDS) problem.• Self-learning concept is employed in hyper-heuristic for a selection of heuristic.• Dynamic selection of parameter is adopted to make the approach, as much as possible, less dependent on parameter values. The empirical study shows the effectiveness of Dynamic selection of parameter.• The proposed approach has been compared with the respective state-of-the-art approaches for both the SPP and MWDS problem.• Computational results show the superiority of the proposed approach.