<p>Generation constructive hyper-heuristics have proven to be very effective at creating construction heuristics for combinatorial optimization problems, with the heuristics derived by these hyper-heuristics often outperforming human-derived heuristics. Genetic programming has been predominantly used by generation constructive hyper-heuristics. This study investigates the effectiveness of two emerging technologies in genetic programming, namely, transfer learning and structure-based genetic programming, in genetic programming constructive generation hyper-heuristics. The study investigates whether structure-based genetic programming in generation constructive hyper-heuristics with (SBGP-HH-TL) and without transfer learning (SBGP-HH). The hyper-heuristics were evaluated on three problem domains, namely, the examination timetabling problem, the one-dimensional bin packing problem and the capacitated vehicle routing problem. Both SBGP-HH-TL and SBGP-HH outperformed the generational hyper-heuristic employing canonical genetic programming (CGP-HH) on a majority of the problem instances for the three problem domains, with SBGP-HH-TL outperforming SBGP-HH. Hence, the study has revealed that both transfer learning and structure-based genetic programming have resulted in performance improvements in genetic programming generation constructive hyper-heuristics for combinatorial optimization.</p>