Self-organization and adaptation are concepts stemming from the nature and have been adopted in systems theory. This book provides in-depth thoughts about several methodologies and technologies for the area. It represents the future generation of IT systems, comprised of communication infrastructures and computing applications.

This book presents the state-of-the-art in successfully engineered self-organizing systems. It goes further, too, to examine ways to balance design and self-organization in the context of applications. As demonstrated throughout, finding this balance helps to deal with diverse practical challenges. The case studies described illustrate the richness of the topic and provide guidance on its more intricate areas.

Technology is taking us to a world where myriads of heavily networked devices interact with the physical world in multiple ways, and at many levels, from the globalInternetdowntomicroandnanodevices. Manyofthesedevicesarehighly mobile and autonomous and must adapt to the surrounding environment in a totally unsupervised way. A fundamental research challenge is the design of robust decentralized c- puting systemsthat arecapableofoperating in changing environmentsandwith noisy input, and yet exhibit the desired behavior and response time, under c- straints such as energy consumption, size, and processing power. These systems should be able to adapt and learn how to react to unforeseen scenarios as well as to display properties comparable to social entities. The observation of nature has brought us many great and unforeseen concepts. Biological systems are able to handle many of these challenges with an elegance and e?ciency far beyond currenthumanartifacts. Basedonthisobservation,bio-inspiredapproacheshave been proposed as a means of handling the complexity of such systems. The goal is to obtain methods to engineer technical systems, which are of a stability and e?ciency comparable to those found in biological entities. This Special Issue on Biological and Biologically-inspired Communication contains the best papers from the Second International Conference on Bio- Inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems (BIONET- ICS 2007). The BIONETICS conference aims to bring together researchers and scientistsfromseveraldisciplines incomputerscienceandengineeringwhereb- inspired methods are investigated, as well as from bioinformatics, to deepen the information exchange and collaboration among the di?erent communities.

Biological and other natural processes have always been a source of inspiration for computer science and information technology. Many emerging problem solving techniques integrate advanced evolution and cooperation strategies, encompassing a range of spatio-temporal scales for visionary conceptualization of evolutionary computation. The previous editions of NICSO were held in Granada, Spain (2006), Acireale, Italy (2007), Tenerife, Spain (2008), and again in Granada in 2010. NICSO evolved to be one of the most interesting and profiled workshops in nature inspired computing. NICSO 2011 has offered an inspiring environment for debating the state of the art ideas and techniques in nature inspired cooperative strategies and a comprehensive image on recent applications of these ideas and techniques. The topics covered by this volume include Swarm Intelligence (such as Ant and Bee Colony Optimization), Genetic Algorithms, Multiagent Systems, Coevolution and Cooperation strategies, Adversarial Models, Synergic Building Blocks, Complex Networks, Social Impact Models, Evolutionary Design, Self Organized Criticality, Evolving Systems, Cellular Automata, Hybrid Algorithms, and Membrane Computing (P-Systems).

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Hybrid Artificial Intelligence Systems, HAIS 2008, held in Burgos, Spain, during September 24-26, 2008. The 93 papers presented, together with 4 invited talks, were carefully reviewed and selected from 280 submissions. The topics covered are agents and multi-agent systems; evolutionary computation; connectionist models; optimization sysetms; fuzzy logic systems; classification and classifiers; cluster analysis; video and image analysis; learning systems, algorithms and applications; hybrid systems based on negotiation and social network modelling; real world applications of HAIS under uncertainty; hybrid intelligent systems for multi-robot and multi-agent systems; applications of hybrid artificial intelligence in bioinformatics; and novel approaches to genetic fuzzy systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2013, held in Zaragoza, Spain, in September 2013.The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: business models, energy consumption, resource allocation, work in progress on resource allocation, work in progress on pricing, quality of service, work in progress on utility and ROI modeling.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th International Bi-Conference Workshop on Agent-Oriented Information Systems, AOIS 2005, held in Utrecht, Netherlands, in July 2005 and in Klagenfurt, Austria, in October 2005. The 19 revised full papers are organized in topical sections on agent behavior, communications and reasoning, methodologies and ontologies, agent-oriented software engineering, as well as applications.

Biological and natural processes have been a continuous source of inspiration for the sciences and engineering. For instance, the work of Wiener in cybernetics was influenced by feedback control processes observable in biological systems; McCulloch and Pitts description of the artificial neuron was instigated by biological observations of neural mechanisms; the idea of survival of the fittest inspired the field of evolutionary algorithms and similarly, artificial immune systems, ant colony optimisation, automated self-assembling programming, membrane computing, etc. also have their roots in natural phenomena. The second International Workshop on Nature Inspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimization (NICSO), was held in Acireale, Italy, during November 8-10, 2007. The aim for NICSO 2007 was to provide a forum were the latest ideas and state of the art research related to cooperative strategies for problem solving arising from Nature could be discussed. The contributions collected in this book were strictly peer reviewed by at least three members of the international programme committee, to whom we are indebted for their support and assistance. The topics covered by the contributions include several well established nature inspired techniques like Genetic Algorithms, Ant Colonies, Artificial Immune Systems, Evolutionary Robotics, Evolvable Systems, Membrane Computing, Quantum Computing, Software Self Assembly, Swarm Intelligence, etc.

The study of Complex Systems is growing rapidly, and modelling and simulation tools are an important part of the process. This volume brings together work from a multidisciplinary group of scientists, from biology and computer science, who are studying a variety of techniques and applications for modelling and simulating complex systems. A common theme emerging from much of this work is an emphasis on validation: how one can have confidence that a computer simulation is saying something sensible about the complex real-world domain of interest.

This book and its companion volume, LNCS vols. 7331 and 7332, constitute the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, ICSI 2012, held in Shenzhen, China in June 2012. The 145 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 247 submissions. The papers are organized in 27 cohesive sections covering all major topics of swarm intelligence research and developments.