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.

Companies and organizations everywhere cite creativity as the most desirable - and elusive - leadership quality of the future. Yet scores measuring creativity among American children have been on the wane for decades. A specialist in creative leadership, professor James Haywood Rolling, Jr. knows firsthand that the classroom is a key to either unlocking or blocking the critical imagination. He argues that today's schools, with their focus on rote learning and test-taking, work to stymie creativity, leaving children cut off from their natural impulses and boxed in by low expectations. Drawing on cutting-edge research in the realms of biological swarm theory, systems theory, and complexity theory, Rolling shows why group collaboration and adaptive social networking make us both smarter and more creative, and how we can design education and workplace practices around these natural principles, instead of pushing a limited focus on individual achievement that serves neither children nor their future colleagues, managers and mentors. The surprising truth is that the future will be pioneered by the collective problem-solvers, making Swarm Intelligence a must-read for business leaders, educators, and anyone else concerned with nurturing creative intelligence and innovative habits in today's youth.

Social insects--ants, bees, termites, and wasps--can be viewed as powerful problem-solving systems with sophisticated collective intelligence. Composed of simple interacting agents, this intelligence lies in the networks of interactions among individuals and between individuals and the environment. A fascinating subject, social insects are also a powerful metaphor for artificial intelligence, and the problems they solve--finding food, dividing labor among nestmates, building nests, responding to external challenges--have important counterparts in engineering and computer science. This book provides a detailed look at models of social insect behavior and how to apply these models in the design of complex systems. The book shows how these models replace an emphasis on control, preprogramming, and centralization with designs featuring autonomy, emergence, and distributed functioning. These designs are proving immensely flexible and robust, able to adapt quickly to changing environments and to continue functioning even when individual elements fail. In particular, these designs are an exciting approach to the tremendous growth of complexity in software and information. Swarm Intelligence draws on up-to-date research from biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, operations research, and computer graphics, and each chapter is organized around a particular biological example, which is then used to develop an algorithm, a multiagent system, or a group of robots. The book will be an invaluable resource for a broad range of disciplines.

Swarm Intelligence: Principles, Advances, and Applications delivers in-depth coverage of bat, artificial fish swarm, firefly, cuckoo search, flower pollination, artificial bee colony, wolf search, and gray wolf optimization algorithms. The book begins with a brief introduction to mathematical optimization, addressing basic concepts related to swarm intelligence, such as randomness, random walks, and chaos theory. The text then: Describes the various swarm intelligence optimization methods, standardizing the variants, hybridizations, and algorithms whenever possible Discusses variants that focus more on binary, discrete, constrained, adaptive, and chaotic versions of the swarm optimizers Depicts real-world applications of the individual optimizers, emphasizing variable selection and fitness function design Details the similarities, differences, weaknesses, and strengths of each swarm optimization method Draws parallels between the operators and searching manners of the different algorithms Swarm Intelligence: Principles, Advances, and Applications presents a comprehensive treatment of modern swarm intelligence optimization methods, complete with illustrative examples and an extendable MATLAB® package for feature selection in wrapper mode applied on different data sets with benchmarking using different evaluation criteria. The book provides beginners with a solid foundation of swarm intelligence fundamentals, and offers experts valuable insight into new directions and hybridizations.

Swarm Intelligence and bio-inspired computation have become increasing popular in the last two decades. Bio-inspired algorithms such as ant colony algorithms, bat algorithms, bee algorithms, firefly algorithms, cuckoo search and particle swarm optimization have been applied in almost every area of science and engineering with a dramatic increase of number of relevant publications. This book reviews the latest developments in swarm intelligence and bio-inspired computation from both the theory and application side, providing a complete resource that analyzes and discusses the latest and future trends in research directions. It can help new researchers to carry out timely research and inspire readers to develop new algorithms. With its impressive breadth and depth, this book will be useful for advanced undergraduate students, PhD students and lecturers in computer science, engineering and science as well as researchers and engineers. - Focuses on the introduction and analysis of key algorithms - Includes case studies for real-world applications - Contains a balance of theory and applications, so readers who are interested in either algorithm or applications will all benefit from this timely book.

The book’s contributing authors are among the top researchers in swarm intelligence. The book is intended to provide an overview of the subject to novices, and to offer researchers an update on interesting recent developments. Introductory chapters deal with the biological foundations, optimization, swarm robotics, and applications in new-generation telecommunication networks, while the second part contains chapters on more specific topics of swarm intelligence research.

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.