Recently, novel metaheuristic techniques have emerged in response to the limitations of conventional approaches, leading to enhanced outcomes. These new methods introduce interesting mechanisms and innovative collaborative strategies that facilitate the efficient exploration and exploitation of extensive search spaces characterized by numerous dimensions. The objective of this book is to present advancements that discuss novel alternative metaheuristic developments that have demonstrated their effectiveness in tackling various complex problems. This book encompasses a variety of emerging metaheuristic methods and their practical applications. The content is presented from a teaching perspective, making it particularly suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students in fields such as science, electrical engineering, and computational mathematics. The book aligns well with courses in artificial intelligence, electrical engineering, and evolutionary computation. Furthermore, the material offers valuable insights to researchers within the metaheuristic and engineering communities. Similarly, engineering practitioners unfamiliar with metaheuristic computation concepts will recognize the pragmatic value of the discussed techniques. These methods transcend mere theoretical tools that have been adapted to effectively address the significant real-world problems commonly encountered in engineering domains.

This book is primarily intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Science, Electrical Engineering, or Computational Mathematics. Metaheuristic search methods are so numerous and varied in terms of design and potential applications; however, for such an abundant family of optimization techniques, there seems to be a question which needs to be answered: Which part of the design in a metaheuristic algorithm contributes more to its better performance? Several works that compare the performance among metaheuristic approaches have been reported in the literature. Nevertheless, they suffer from one of the following limitations: (A)Their conclusions are based on the performance of popular evolutionary approaches over a set of synthetic functions with exact solutions and well-known behaviors, without considering the application context or including recent developments. (B) Their conclusions consider only the comparison of their final results which cannot evaluate the nature of a good or bad balance between exploration and exploitation. The objective of this book is to compare the performance of various metaheuristic techniques when they are faced with complex optimization problems extracted from different engineering domains. The material has been compiled from a teaching perspective.

This book provides both the research and practitioner communities with a comprehensive coverage of the metaheuristic methodologies that have proven to be successful in a wide variety of real-world problem settings. Moreover, it is these metaheuristic strategies that hold particular promise for success in the future. The various chapters serve as stand alone presentations giving both the necessary background underpinnings as well as practical guides for implementation.

This book presents a comparative perspective of current metaheuristic developments, which have proved to be effective in their application to several complex problems. The study of biological and social entities such as animals, humans, or insects that manifest a cooperative behavior has produced several computational models in metaheuristic methods. Although these schemes emulate very different processes or systems, the rules used to model individual behavior are very similar. Under such conditions, it is not clear to identify which are the advantages or disadvantages of each metaheuristic technique. The book is compiled from a teaching perspective. For this reason, the book is primarily intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Science, Electrical Engineering, or Computational Mathematics. It is appropriate for courses such as Artificial Intelligence, Electrical Engineering, Evolutionary Computation. The book is also useful for researchers from the evolutionary and engineering communities. Likewise, engineer practitioners, who are not familiar with metaheuristic computation concepts, will appreciate that the techniques discussed are beyond simple theoretical tools since they have been adapted to solve significant problems that commonly arise in engineering areas.

This book presents the latest trends and developments in multimodal optimization and niching techniques. Most existing optimization methods are designed for locating a single global solution. However, in real-world settings, many problems are “multimodal” by nature, i.e., multiple satisfactory solutions exist. It may be desirable to locate several such solutions before deciding which one to use. Multimodal optimization has been the subject of intense study in the field of population-based meta-heuristic algorithms, e.g., evolutionary algorithms (EAs), for the past few decades. These multimodal optimization techniques are commonly referred to as “niching” methods, because of the nature-inspired “niching” effect that is induced to the solution population targeting at multiple optima. Many niching methods have been developed in the EA community. Some classic examples include crowding, fitness sharing, clearing, derating, restricted tournament selection, speciation, etc. Nevertheless, applying these niching methods to real-world multimodal problems often encounters significant challenges. To facilitate the advance of niching methods in facing these challenges, this edited book highlights the latest developments in niching methods. The included chapters touch on algorithmic improvements and developments, representation, and visualization issues, as well as new research directions, such as preference incorporation in decision making and new application areas. This edited book is a first of this kind specifically on the topic of niching techniques. This book will serve as a valuable reference book both for researchers and practitioners. Although chapters are written in a mutually independent way, Chapter 1 will help novice readers get an overview of the field. It describes the development of the field and its current state and provides a comparative analysis of the IEEE CEC and ACM GECCO niching competitions of recent years, followed by a collection of open research questions and possible research directions that may be tackled in the future.

This book presents advances in alternative swarm development that have proved to be effective in several complex problems. Swarm intelligence (SI) is a problem-solving methodology that results from the cooperation between a set of agents with similar characteristics. The study of biological entities, such as animals and insects, manifesting social behavior has resulted in several computational models of swarm intelligence. While there are numerous books addressing the most widely known swarm methods, namely ant colony algorithms and particle swarm optimization, those discussing new alternative approaches are rare. The focus on developments based on the simple modification of popular swarm methods overlooks the opportunity to discover new techniques and procedures that can be useful in solving problems formulated by the academic and industrial communities. Presenting various novel swarm methods and their practical applications, the book helps researchers, lecturers, engineers and practitioners solve their own optimization problems.