Submission Due Date: January 31, 2012
Special Issue On: Swarm Optimization and Engineering Applications
Guest Editors: Xinchao Zhao, Yong Wang, and Xingmei Li
Introduction
    A swarm has been defined as a set of (mobile) agents which are liable to communicate directly or indirectly (by acting on their local environment) with each other, and which collectively carry out a distributed problem solving. The collective and individual intelligence arises within the swarm.

    In recent years, intelligent algorithms and swarm optimization applications have gained great interests from the world-wide scholars of many related research fields. On the other view, complexity of the real world problems and limitation of existing derivative-based computational approaches have shifted researchers and engineers all over the world to utilize the metaheuristic algorithms founded on simulations of swarm intelligence for solving computationally intractable engineering optimization problems.

    Nature, especial swarm intelligence, is the best and greatest teacher who teaches us how to solve the questions. The key is how well we will learn from him. This special issue will be an interesting journey to learn the most recent success stories of mimicking the nature and culture and their engineering applications.

Objective of the Special Issue
    This special issue intends to collect in one volume high quality papers on all aspects of the emergent fields of swarm intelligence and engineering applications inspired from metaheuristics. These papers will represent recent developments and outline leading research in the field to design new swarm optimization algorithms, to explore new application areas. It will face to solve specific hard optimization problems and finally creating awareness on metaheuristics to a wider audience of practitioners.

Recommended Topics
Topics to be discussed in this special issue include (but are not limited to) the following: