The Adaptive Computing in Design and Manufacture conference series has become a well-established, largely application-oriented meeting recognised by several UK Engineering Institutions and the International Society of Genetic and Evolutionary Computing. The main theme of the series relates to the integration of evolutionary and adaptive computing technologies with design and manufacturing processes whilst also taking into account complementary advanced computing technologies. Evolutionary and adaptive computing techniques continue to increase their penetration of industrial and commercial practice as awareness of their powerful search, exploration and optimisation capabilities becomes ever more prevalent, and increasing desk-top computational capability renders stochastic population-based search a far more viable proposition. There has been a significant increase in the development and integration of commercial software tools utilising adaptive computing technologies and the emergence of related commercial research and consultancy organisations supporting the introduction of best practice in terms of industrial utilisation. The book is comprised of selected papers that cover a diverse set of industrial application areas including engineering design and design environments and manufacturing process design, scheduling and control. Various aspects of search, exploration and optimisation are investigated in the context of integration with industrial processes including multi-objective and constraint satisfaction, development and utilization of meta-models, algorithm and strategy development and human-centric evolutionary approaches. The role of agent-based and neural net technologies in terms of supporting search processes and providing an alternative simulation environment is also explored. This collection of papers will be of particular interest to both industrial researchers and practitioners in addition to the academic research communities across engineering, operational research and computer science.

The third evolutionary I adaptive computing conference organised by the Plymouth Engineering Design Centre (PEDC) at the University of Plymouth again explores the utility of various adaptive search algorithms and complementary computational intelligence techniques within the engineering design and manufacturing domains. The intention is to investigate strategies and techniques that are of benefit not only as component I system optimisers but also as exploratory design tools capable of supporting the differing requirements of conceptual, embodiment and detailed design whilst taking into account the many manufacturing criteria influencing design direction. Interest in the integration of adaptive computing technologies with engineering has been rapidly increasing in recent years as practical examples illustrating their potential relating to system performance and design process efficiency have become more apparent. This is in addition to the realisation of significant commercial benefits from the application of evolutionary planning and scheduling strategies. The development of this conference series from annual PEDC one day workshops to the biennial 'Adaptive Computing in Engineering Design and Control' conference and this year's event reflects this growth in both academic and industrial interest. The name change to include manufacture relates to a desire to increase cover of integrated product development aspects, facility layout and scheduling in addition to process I machine control.

Following an introduction to the various techniques and examples of their routine application, this potential is explored through the introduction of various strategies that support searches across a far broader set of possible design solutions within time and budget constraints. Generic problem areas investigated include: - design decomposition; - whole-system design; - multi-objective and constraint satisfaction; - human-computer interaction; - computational expense. Appropriate strategies that help overcome problems often encountered when integrating computer-based techniques with complex, real-world design environments are described. A straightforward approach coupled with examples supports a rapid understanding of the manner in which such strategies can best be designed to handle the complexities of a particular problem.

Incorporation of a priori knowledge, such as expert knowledge, meta-heuristics and human preferences, as well as domain knowledge acquired during evolu tionary search, into evolutionary algorithms has received increasing interest in the recent years. It has been shown from various motivations that knowl edge incorporation into evolutionary search is able to significantly improve search efficiency. However, results on knowledge incorporation in evolution ary computation have been scattered in a wide range of research areas and a systematic handling of this important topic in evolutionary computation still lacks. This edited book is a first attempt to put together the state-of-art and re cent advances on knowledge incorporation in evolutionary computation within a unified framework. Existing methods for knowledge incorporation are di vided into the following five categories according to the functionality of the incorporated knowledge in the evolutionary algorithms. 1. Knowledge incorporation in representation, population initialization, - combination and mutation. 2. Knowledge incorporation in selection and reproduction. 3. Knowledge incorporation in fitness evaluations. 4. Knowledge incorporation through life-time learning and human-computer interactions. 5. Incorporation of human preferences in multi-objective evolutionary com putation. The intended readers of this book are graduate students, researchers and practitioners in all fields of science and engineering who are interested in evolutionary computation. The book is divided into six parts. Part I contains one introductory chapter titled "A selected introduction to evolutionary computation" by Yao, which presents a concise but insightful introduction to evolutionary computation.

"Evolutionary Design By Computers offers an enticing preview of the future of computer-aided design: Design by Darwin." Lawrence J. Fogel, President, Natural Selection, Inc. "Evolutionary design by computers is the major revolution in design thinking of the 20th century and this book is the best introduction available." Professor John Frazer, Swire Chair and Head of School of Design, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Author of "An Evolutionary Architecture" "Peter Bentley has assembled and edited an important collection of papers that demonstrate, convincingly, the utility of evolutionary computation for engineering solutions to complex problems in design." David B. Fogel, Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation Some of the most startling achievements in the use of computers to automate design are being accomplished by the use of evolutionary search algorithms to evolve designs. Evolutionary Design By Computers provides a showcase of the best and most original work of the leading international experts in Evolutionary Computation, Engineering Design, Computer Art, and Artificial Life. By bringing together the highest achievers in these fields for the first time, including a foreword by Richard Dawkins, this book provides the definitive coverage of significant developments in Evolutionary Design. This book explores related sub-areas of Evolutionary Design, including: design optimization creative design the creation of art artificial life. It shows for the first time how techniques in each area overlap, and promotes the cross-fertilization of ideas and methods.

"This book provides applications of nature inspired computing for economic theory and practice, finance and stock-market, manufacturing systems, marketing, e-commerce, e-auctions, multi-agent systems and bottom-up simulations for social sciences and operations management"--Provided by publisher.