Introduction to Evolvable Hardware: A Practical Guide for Designing Self-Adaptive Systems provides a fundamental introduction for engineers, designers, and managers involved in the development of adaptive, high reliability systems. It also introduces the concepts of evolvable hardware (EHW) to new researchers in a structured way. With this practical book, you’ll be able to quickly apply the techniques presented to existing design problems.

Evolvable hardware (EHW) refers to hardware whose architecture/structure and functions change dynamically and autonomously in order to improve its performance in carrying out tasks. The only single resource presenting both the fundamentals, and the latest advances in the field, this book teaches the basics of reconfigurable devices, why they are necessary and how they are designed.

This book covers the basic theory, practical details and advanced research of the implementation of evolutionary methods on physical substrates. Most of the examples are from electronic engineering applications, including transistor-level design and system-level implementation. The authors present an overview of the successes achieved, and the book will act as a point of reference for both academic and industrial researchers.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Evolvable Systems, ICES 2007, held in Wuhan, China, in September 2007. The 41 revised full papers collected in this volume are organized in topical sections on digital hardware evolution, analog hardware evolution, bio-inspired systems, mechanical hardware evolution, evolutionary design, evolutionary algorithms in hardware design, and hardware implementation of evolutionary algorithms.

At the beginning of the 1990s research started in how to combine soft comput ing with reconfigurable hardware in a quite unique way. One of the methods that was developed has been called evolvable hardware. Thanks to evolution ary algorithms researchers have started to evolve electronic circuits routinely. A number of interesting circuits - with features unreachable by means of con ventional techniques - have been developed. Evolvable hardware is quite pop ular right now; more than fifty research groups are spread out over the world. Evolvable hardware has become a part of the curriculum at some universi ties. Evolvable hardware is being commercialized and there are specialized conferences devoted to evolvable hardware. On the other hand, surprisingly, we can feel the lack of a theoretical background and consistent design methodology in the area. Furthermore, it is quite difficult to implement really innovative and practically successful evolvable systems using contemporary digital reconfigurable technology.

The idea of evolving machines, whose origins can be traced to the cybernetics movementofthe1940sand1950s,hasrecentlyresurgedintheformofthenascent ?eld of bio-inspired systems and evolvable hardware. The inaugural workshop, Towards Evolvable Hardware, took place in Lausanne in October 1995, followed by the First International Conference on Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware (ICES), held in Tsukuba, Japan in October 1996. The second ICES conference was held in Lausanne in September 1998, with the third and fourth being held in Edinburgh, April 2000 and Tokyo, October 2001 respectively. This has become the leading conference in the ?eld of evolvable systems and the 2003 conference promised to be at least as good as, if not better than, the four that preceeded it. The ?fth international conference was built on the success of its predec- sors, aiming at presenting the latest developments in the ?eld. In addition, it brought together researchers who use biologically inspired concepts to imp- ment real systems in arti?cial intelligence, arti?cial life, robotics, VLSI design and related domains. We would say that this ?fth conference followed on from the previous four in that it consisted of a number of high-quality interesting thought-provoking papers.

Evolutionary algorithms are becoming increasingly attractive across various disciplines, such as operations research, computer science, industrial engineering, electrical engineering, social science and economics. Introduction to Evolutionary Algorithms presents an insightful, comprehensive, and up-to-date treatment of evolutionary algorithms. It covers such hot topics as: • genetic algorithms, • differential evolution, • swarm intelligence, and • artificial immune systems. The reader is introduced to a range of applications, as Introduction to Evolutionary Algorithms demonstrates how to model real world problems, how to encode and decode individuals, and how to design effective search operators according to the chromosome structures with examples of constraint optimization, multiobjective optimization, combinatorial optimization, and supervised/unsupervised learning. This emphasis on practical applications will benefit all students, whether they choose to continue their academic career or to enter a particular industry. Introduction to Evolutionary Algorithms is intended as a textbook or self-study material for both advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Additional features such as recommended further reading and ideas for research projects combine to form an accessible and interesting pedagogical approach to this widely used discipline.