This book presents new and advanced results and developments related to the Bees Algorithm, along with its application to a wide range of engineering problems. Modern complex processes and systems are difficult to optimise using conventional mathematical tools as they require models that often cannot be obtained with accuracy or certainty. Optimising such systems demands efficient, model-free optimisation tools. The Bees Algorithm, a swarm-based technique inspired by the foraging behaviour of honeybees, is an ideal tool for tackling challenging optimisation problems. The algorithm is conceptually elegant and extremely easy to apply. All it needs to solve an optimisation problem is a means to evaluate the quality of potential solutions. While the covered applications belong to diverse engineering fields, this book’s focus is on advanced manufacturing and industrial engineering. The book comprises two parts. The first part explores different enhancements made to the original Bees Algorithm to improve its performance. The second part delves into the algorithm's applications in design, manufacturing, production, ergonomics, logistics, transportation, and electrical and electronic engineering. By showcasing the variety of optimisation tasks successfully handled using the Bees Algorithm, the book aims to inspire and motivate engineers and researchers worldwide to adopt the algorithm as a powerful and versatile tool for conquering complex engineering problems in the Industry 4.0 era and beyond.

This book is the first work dedicated to the Bees Algorithm. Following a gentle introduction to the main ideas underpinning the algorithm, the book presents recent results and developments relating to the algorithm and its application to optimisation problems in production and manufacturing. With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, production and manufacturing processes and systems have become more complex. To obtain the best performance from them requires efficient and effective optimisation techniques that do not depend on the availability of process or system models. Such models are usually either not obtainable or mathematically intractable due to the high degrees of nonlinearities and uncertainties in the processes and systems to be represented. The Bees Algorithm is a powerful swarm-based intelligent optimisation metaheuristic inspired by the foraging behaviour of honeybees. The algorithm is conceptually elegant and extremely easy to apply. All it needs to solve an optimisation problem is a means to evaluate the quality of potential solutions. This book demonstrates the simplicity, effectiveness and versatility of the algorithm and encourages its further adoption by engineers and researchers across the world to realise smart and sustainable manufacturing and production in the age of Industry 4.0 and beyond.

This book presents the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Frontiers of Intelligent Computing: Theory and Applications (FICTA 2017), held in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. The event brought together researchers, scientists, engineers, and practitioners to exchange their new ideas and experiences in the domain of intelligent computing theories with prospective applications to various engineering disciplines. The book is divided into two volumes: Information and Decision Sciences, and Intelligent Engineering Informatics. This volume covers broad areas of Intelligent Engineering Informatics, with papers exploring both the theoretical and practical aspects of various areas like ANN and genetic algorithms, human–computer interaction, intelligent control optimisation, intelligent e-learning systems, machine learning, mobile computing, multi-agent systems, etc. The book also offers a valuable resource for students at the post-graduate level in various engineering disciplines.

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.

This book is a delight for academics, researchers and professionals working in evolutionary and swarm computing, computational intelligence, machine learning and engineering design, as well as search and optimization in general. It provides an introduction to the design and development of a number of popular and recent swarm and evolutionary algorithms with a focus on their applications in engineering problems in diverse domains. The topics discussed include particle swarm optimization, the artificial bee colony algorithm, Spider Monkey optimization algorithm, genetic algorithms, constrained multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, genetic programming, and evolutionary fuzzy systems. A friendly and informative treatment of the topics makes this book an ideal reference for beginners and those with experience alike.

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.

Over the past two decades, swarm intelligence has emerged as a powerful approach to solving optimization as well as other complex problems. Swarm intelligence models are inspired by social behaviours of simple agents interacting among themselves as well as with the environment, e.g., flocking of birds, schooling of fish, foraging of bees and ants. The collective behaviours that emerge out of the interactions at the colony level are useful in achieving complex goals. The main aim of this research book is to present a sample of recent innovations and advances in techniques and applications of swarm intelligence. Among the topics covered in this book include: particle swarm optimization and hybrid methods, ant colony optimization and hybrid methods, bee colony optimization, glowworm swarm optimization, and complex social swarms, application of various swarm intelligence models to operational planning of energy plants, modeling and control of nanorobots, classification of documents, identification of disease biomarkers, and prediction of gene signals. The book is directed to researchers, practicing professionals, and undergraduate as well as graduate students of all disciplines who are interested in enhancing their knowledge in techniques and applications of swarm intelligence.