Computational Intelligence and Metaheuristic Algorithms with Applications

Nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms have become powerful and popular in computational intelligence and many applications. There are some important developments in recent years, and this special issue aims to provide a timely review of such developments, including ant colony optimization, bat algorithm, cuckoo search, particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithms, support vector machine, neural networks, and others. In addition, these algorithms have been applied in a diverse range of applications, and some of these latest applications are also summarized here. Computational intelligence and metaheuristic algorithms have become increasingly popular in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, engineering design, data mining, image processing, and data-intensive applications. Most algorithms in computational intelligence and optimization are based on swarm intelligence (SI) [1, 2]. For example, both particle swarm optimization [1] and cuckoo search [3] have attracted much attention in science and engineering. They both can effectively deal with continuous problems [2] and combinatorial problems [4]. These algorithms are very different from the conventional evolutionary algorithms such as genetic algorithms and simulated annealing [5, 6] and other heuristics [7]. Many new optimization algorithms are based on the so-called swarm intelligence (SI) with diverse characteristics in mimicking natural systems [1, 2]. Consequently, different algorithms may have different features and thus may behave differently, even with different efficiencies. However, It still lacks in-depth understanding why these algorithms work well and exactly under what conditions, though there were some good studies that may provide insight into algorithms [2, 8]. This special issue focuses on the recent developments of SI-based metaheuristic algorithms and their diverse applications as well as theoretical studies. Therefore, this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides an introduction and comparison of the so-called infinite monkey theorem and metaheuristics, followed by the brief review of computational intelligence and metaheuristics in Section 3. Then, Section 4 touches briefly the state-of-the-art developments, and finally, Section 5 provides some open problems about some key issues concerning computational intelligence and metaheuristics.