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 book compiles recent advances of evolutionary algorithms in dynamic and uncertain environments within a unified framework. The book is motivated by the fact that some degree of uncertainty is inevitable in characterizing any realistic engineering systems. Discussion includes representative methods for addressing major sources of uncertainties in evolutionary computation, including handle of noisy fitness functions, use of approximate fitness functions, search for robust solutions, and tracking moving optimums.

The book is a timely report on advanced methods and applications of computational intelligence systems. It covers a long list of interconnected research areas, such as fuzzy systems, neural networks, evolutionary computation, evolving systems and machine learning. The individual chapters are based on peer-reviewed contributions presented at the 16th Annual UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence, held on September 7-9, 2016, in Lancaster, UK. The book puts a special emphasis on novels methods and reports on their use in a wide range of applications areas, thus providing both academics and professionals with a comprehensive and timely overview of new trends in computational intelligence.

This book presents several recent advances on Evolutionary Computation, specially evolution-based optimization methods and hybrid algorithms for several applications, from optimization and learning to pattern recognition and bioinformatics. This book also presents new algorithms based on several analogies and metafores, where one of them is based on philosophy, specifically on the philosophy of praxis and dialectics. In this book it is also presented interesting applications on bioinformatics, specially the use of particle swarms to discover gene expression patterns in DNA microarrays. Therefore, this book features representative work on the field of evolutionary computation and applied sciences. The intended audience is graduate, undergraduate, researchers, and anyone who wishes to become familiar with the latest research work on this field.

This book introduces numerous algorithmic hybridizations between both worlds that show how machine learning can improve and support evolution strategies. The set of methods comprises covariance matrix estimation, meta-modeling of fitness and constraint functions, dimensionality reduction for search and visualization of high-dimensional optimization processes, and clustering-based niching. After giving an introduction to evolution strategies and machine learning, the book builds the bridge between both worlds with an algorithmic and experimental perspective. Experiments mostly employ a (1+1)-ES and are implemented in Python using the machine learning library scikit-learn. The examples are conducted on typical benchmark problems illustrating algorithmic concepts and their experimental behavior. The book closes with a discussion of related lines of research.

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are population-based, stochastic search algorithms that mimic natural evolution. Due to their ability to find excellent solutions for conventionally hard and dynamic problems within acceptable time, EAs have attracted interest from many researchers and practitioners in recent years. This book “Variants of Evolutionary Algorithms for Real-World Applications” aims to promote the practitioner’s view on EAs by providing a comprehensive discussion of how EAs can be adapted to the requirements of various applications in the real-world domains. It comprises 14 chapters, including an introductory chapter re-visiting the fundamental question of what an EA is and other chapters addressing a range of real-world problems such as production process planning, inventory system and supply chain network optimisation, task-based jobs assignment, planning for CNC-based work piece construction, mechanical/ship design tasks that involve runtime-intense simulations, data mining for the prediction of soil properties, automated tissue classification for MRI images, and database query optimisation, among others. These chapters demonstrate how different types of problems can be successfully solved using variants of EAs and how the solution approaches are constructed, in a way that can be understood and reproduced with little prior knowledge on optimisation.

This state-of-the-art survey offers a renewed and refreshing focus on the progress in nature-inspired and linguistically motivated computation. The book presents the expertise and experiences of leading researchers spanning a diverse spectrum of computational intelligence in the areas of neurocomputing, fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, and adjacent areas. The result is a balanced contribution to the field of computational intelligence that should serve the community not only as a survey and a reference, but also as an inspiration for the future advancement of the state of the art of the field. The 18 selected chapters originate from lectures and presentations given at the 5th IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, WCCI 2008, held in Hong Kong, China, in June 2008. After an introduction to the field and an overview of the volume, the chapters are divided into four topical sections on machine learning and brain computer interface, fuzzy modeling and control, computational evolution, and applications.

Noisy optimization is a topic of growing interest for researchers working on mainstream optimization problems. Although several techniques for dealing with stochastic noise in optimization problems are covered in journals and conference proceedings, today there are virtually no books that approach noisy optimization from a layman’s perspective; this book remedies that gap. Beginning with the foundations of evolutionary optimization, the book subsequently explores the principles of noisy optimization in single and multi-objective settings, and presents detailed illustrations of the principles developed for application in real-world multi-agent coordination problems. Special emphasis is given to the design of intelligent algorithms for noisy optimization in real-time applications. The book is unique in terms of its content, writing style and above all its simplicity, which will appeal to readers with a broad range of backgrounds. The book is divided into 7 chapters, the first of which provides an introduction to Swarm and Evolutionary Optimization algorithms. Chapter 2 includes a thorough review of agent architectures for multi-agent coordination. In turn, Chapter 3 provides an extensive review of noisy optimization, while Chapter 4 addresses issues of noise handling in the context of single-objective optimization problems. An illustrative case study on multi-robot path-planning in the presence of measurement noise is also highlighted in this chapter. Chapter 5 deals with noisy multi-objective optimization and includes a case study on noisy multi-robot box-pushing. In Chapter 6, the authors examine the scope of various algorithms in noisy optimization problems. Lastly, Chapter 7 summarizes the main results obtained in the previous chapters and elaborates on the book’s potential with regard to real-world noisy optimization problems.