This book gravitates on the prominent theories and recent developments of swarm intelligence methods, and their application in both synthetic and real-world optimization problems. The special interest will be placed in those algorithmic variants where biological processes observed in nature have underpinned the core operators underlying their search mechanisms. In other words, the book centers its attention on swarm intelligence and nature-inspired methods for efficient optimization and problem solving. The content of this book unleashes a great opportunity for researchers, lecturers and practitioners interested in swarm intelligence, optimization problems and artificial intelligence.

Resource optimization has always been a thrust area of research, and as the Internet of Things (IoT) is the most talked about topic of the current era of technology, it has become the need of the hour. Therefore, the idea behind this book was to simplify the journey of those who aspire to understand resource optimization in the IoT. To this end, included in this book are various real-time/offline applications and algorithms/case studies in the fields of engineering, computer science, information security, and cloud computing, along with the modern tools and various technologies used in systems, leaving the reader with a high level of understanding of various techniques and algorithms used in resource optimization.

In the era globalisation the emerging technologies are governing engineering industries to a multifaceted state. The escalating complexity has demanded researchers to find the possible ways of easing the solution of the problems. This has motivated the researchers to grasp ideas from the nature and implant it in the engineering sciences. This way of thinking led to emergence of many biologically inspired algorithms that have proven to be efficient in handling the computationally complex problems with competence such as Genetic Algorithm (GA), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), etc. Motivated by the capability of the biologically inspired algorithms the present book on "Swarm Intelligence: Focus on Ant and Particle Swarm Optimization" aims to present recent developments and applications concerning optimization with swarm intelligence techniques. The papers selected for this book comprise a cross-section of topics that reflect a variety of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds. In addition to the introduction of new concepts of swarm intelligence, this book also presented some selected representative case studies covering power plant maintenance scheduling; geotechnical engineering; design and machining tolerances; layout problems; manufacturing process plan; job-shop scheduling; structural design; environmental dispatching problems; wireless communication; water distribution systems; multi-plant supply chain; fault diagnosis of airplane engines; and process scheduling. I believe these 27 chapters presented in this book adequately reflect these topics.

From nature, we observe swarming behavior in the form of ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, honey bees, swarming of bacteria, and many more. It is only in recent years that researchers have taken notice of such natural swarming systems as culmination of some form of innate collective intelligence, albeit swarm intelligence (SI) - a metaphor that inspires a myriad of computational problem-solving techniques. In computational intelligence, swarm-like algorithms have been successfully applied to solve many real-world problems in engineering and sciences. This handbook volume serves as a useful foundational as well as consolidatory state-of-art collection of articles in the field from various researchers around the globe. It has a rich collection of contributions pertaining to the theoretical and empirical study of single and multi-objective variants of swarm intelligence based algorithms like particle swarm optimization (PSO), ant colony optimization (ACO), bacterial foraging optimization algorithm (BFOA), honey bee social foraging algorithms, and harmony search (HS). With chapters describing various applications of SI techniques in real-world engineering problems, this handbook can be a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners, giving an in-depth flavor of what SI is capable of achieving.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Swarm Intelligence Based Optimization, ICSIBO 2014, held in Mulhouse, France, in May 2014. The 20 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. Topics of interest presented and discussed in the conference focuses on the theoretical progress of swarm intelligence metaheuristics and their applications in areas such as: theoretical advances of swarm intelligence metaheuristics, combinatorial, discrete, binary, constrained, multi-objective, multi-modal, dynamic, noisy, and large-scale optimization, artificial immune systems, particle swarms, ant colony, bacterial foraging, artificial bees, fireflies algorithm, hybridization of algorithms, parallel/distributed computing, machine learning, data mining, data clustering, decision making and multi-agent systems based on swarm intelligence principles, adaptation and applications of swarm intelligence principles to real world problems in various domains.

Swarm intelligence algorithms are a form of nature-based optimization algorithms. Their main inspiration is the cooperative behavior of animals within specific communities. This can be described as simple behaviors of individuals along with the mechanisms for sharing knowledge between them, resulting in the complex behavior of the entire community. Examples of such behavior can be found in ant colonies, bee swarms, schools of fish or bird flocks. Swarm intelligence algorithms are used to solve difficult optimization problems for which there are no exact solving methods or the use of such methods is impossible, e.g. due to unacceptable computational time. This book thoroughly presents the basics of 24 algorithms selected from the entire family of swarm intelligence algorithms. Each chapter deals with a different algorithm describing it in detail and showing how it works in the form of a pseudo-code. In addition, the source code is provided for each algorithm in Matlab and in the C ++ programming language. In order to better understand how each swarm intelligence algorithm works, a simple numerical example is included in each chapter, which guides the reader step by step through the individual stages of the algorithm, showing all necessary calculations. This book can provide the basics for understanding how swarm intelligence algorithms work, and aid readers in programming these algorithms on their own to solve various computational problems. This book should also be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying nature-based optimization algorithms, and can be a helpful tool for learning the basics of these algorithms efficiently and quickly. In addition, it can be a useful source of knowledge for scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence, as well as for engineers interested in using this type of algorithms in their work. If the reader already has basic knowledge of swarm intelligence algorithms, we recommend the book: "Swarm Intelligence Algorithms: Modifications and Applications" (Edited by A. Slowik, CRC Press, 2020), which describes selected modifications of these algorithms and presents their practical applications.

Systems designers have learned that many agents co-operating within the system can solve very complex problems with a minimal design effort. In general, multi-agent systems that use swarm intelligence are said to be swarm intelligent systems. Today, these are mostly used as search engines and optimization tools. This volume reviews innovative methodologies of swarm intelligence, outlines the foundations of engineering swarm intelligent systems and applications, and relates experiences using the particle swarm optimisation.