Swarm and Evolutionary Computation

Abstract

Optimization problems arise in various fields of science, engineering, and industry. In many occasions, such optimization problems, particularly in the present scenario, involve a variety of decision variables and complex structured objectives, and constraints. Often, the classical or traditional optimization techniques face difficulty in solving such real world optimization problems in their original form. Due to deficiencies of classical optimization algorithms in solving large-scale, highly non-linear, and often non-differentiable problems, there is a need to develop efficient and robust computational algorithms, which can solve problems, numerically irrespective of their sizes. Taking inspiration from nature to develop computationally efficient algorithms is one way to deal with real world optimization problems. Broadly, one can put these algorithms in the field of computational sciences and in particular, to computational intelligence. Formally, computational intelligence (CI) is a set of nature-inspired computational methodologies and approaches to solve complex real world problems. The major constituents of CI are Fuzzy Systems (FS), Neural Networks (NN), and Swarm Intelligence (SI) and Evolutionary Computation (EC). Computational intelligence techniques are powerful, efficient, flexible, and reliable. Swarm Intelligence and Evolutionary Computation are two very useful components of computational intelligence that are primarily used to solve optimization problems. This book primarily concerns with various swarm and evolutionary optimization algorithms. This chapter provides a brief introduction to swarm and evolutionary algorithms.