This book provides a collection of fourty articles containing new material on both theoretical aspects of Evolutionary Computing (EC), and demonstrating the usefulness/success of it for various kinds of large-scale real world problems. Around 23 articles deal with various theoretical aspects of EC and 17 articles demonstrate the success of EC methodologies. These articles are written by leading experts of the field from different countries all over the world.

This edited book reports on recent developments in the theory of evolutionary computation, or more generally the domain of randomized search heuristics. It starts with two chapters on mathematical methods that are often used in the analysis of randomized search heuristics, followed by three chapters on how to measure the complexity of a search heuristic: black-box complexity, a counterpart of classical complexity theory in black-box optimization; parameterized complexity, aimed at a more fine-grained view of the difficulty of problems; and the fixed-budget perspective, which answers the question of how good a solution will be after investing a certain computational budget. The book then describes theoretical results on three important questions in evolutionary computation: how to profit from changing the parameters during the run of an algorithm; how evolutionary algorithms cope with dynamically changing or stochastic environments; and how population diversity influences performance. Finally, the book looks at three algorithm classes that have only recently become the focus of theoretical work: estimation-of-distribution algorithms; artificial immune systems; and genetic programming. Throughout the book the contributing authors try to develop an understanding for how these methods work, and why they are so successful in many applications. The book will be useful for students and researchers in theoretical computer science and evolutionary computing.

Genetic algorithms are founded upon the principle of evolution, i.e., survival of the fittest. Hence evolution programming techniques, based on genetic algorithms, are applicable to many hard optimization problems, such as optimization of functions with linear and nonlinear constraints, the traveling salesman problem, and problems of scheduling, partitioning, and control. The importance of these techniques is still growing, since evolution programs are parallel in nature, and parallelism is one of the most promising directions in computer science. The book is self-contained and the only prerequisite is basic undergraduate mathematics. This third edition has been substantially revised and extended by three new chapters and by additional appendices containing working material to cover recent developments and a change in the perception of evolutionary computation.

Genetic and evolutionary algorithms (GEAs) have often achieved an enviable success in solving optimization problems in a wide range of disciplines. This book provides effective optimization algorithms for solving a broad class of problems quickly, accurately, and reliably by employing evolutionary mechanisms.

This timely review volume summarizes the state-of-the-art developments in nature-inspired algorithms and applications with the emphasis on swarm intelligence and bio-inspired computation. Topics include the analysis and overview of swarm intelligence and evolutionary computation, hybrid metaheuristic algorithms, bat algorithm, discrete cuckoo search, firefly algorithm, particle swarm optimization, and harmony search as well as convergent hybridization. Application case studies have focused on the dehydration of fruits and vegetables by the firefly algorithm and goal programming, feature selection by the binary flower pollination algorithm, job shop scheduling, single row facility layout optimization, training of feed-forward neural networks, damage and stiffness identification, synthesis of cross-ambiguity functions by the bat algorithm, web document clustering, truss analysis, water distribution networks, sustainable building designs and others. As a timely review, this book can serve as an ideal reference for graduates, lecturers, engineers and researchers in computer science, evolutionary computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational intelligence, data mining, engineering optimization and designs.

'What does your Master teach?' asked a visitor. 'Nothing,' said the disciple. 'Then why does he give discourses?' 'He only points the way - he teaches nothing.' Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom During the last three decades there has been a growing interest in algorithms which rely on analogies to natural processes. The emergence of massively par allel computers made these algorithms of practical interest. The best known algorithms in this class include evolutionary programming, genetic algorithms, evolution strategies, simulated annealing, classifier systems, and neural net works. Recently (1-3 October 1990) the University of Dortmund, Germany, hosted the First Workshop on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature [164]. This book discusses a subclass of these algorithms - those which are based on the principle of evolution (survival of the fittest). In such algorithms a popu lation of individuals (potential solutions) undergoes a sequence of unary (muta tion type) and higher order (crossover type) transformations. These individuals strive for survival: a selection scheme, biased towards fitter individuals, selects the next generation. After some number of generations, the program converges - the best individual hopefully represents the optimum solution. There are many different algorithms in this category. To underline the sim ilarities between them we use the common term "evolution programs" .

Rapid advances in evolutionary computation have opened up a world of applications-a world rapidly growing and evolving. Decision making, neural networks, pattern recognition, complex optimization/search tasks, scheduling, control, automated programming, and cellular automata applications all rely on evolutionary computation. Evolutionary Computation presents the basic principles of evolutionary computing: genetic algorithms, evolution strategies, evolutionary programming, genetic programming, learning classifier systems, population models, and applications. It includes detailed coverage of binary and real encoding, including selection, crossover, and mutation, and discusses the (m+l) and (m,l) evolution strategy principles. The focus then shifts to applications: decision strategy selection, training and design of neural networks, several approaches to pattern recognition, cellular automata, applications of genetic programming, and more.