Nature That Breeds Solutions

Abstract

Nature has always been a source of inspiration. Over the last few decades, it has stimulated many successful techniques, algorithms and computational applications for dealing with large, complex and dynamic real world problems. In this article, the authors discuss why nature-inspired solutions have become increasingly important and favourable for tackling the conventionally-hard problems. They also present the concepts and background of some selected examples from the domain of natural computing, and describe their key applications in business, science and engineering. Finally, the future trends are highlighted to provide a vision for the potential growth of this field.

Metaheuristics in the Balance: A Survey on Memory-Saving Approaches for Platforms with Seriously Limited Resources

“…Metaheuristics do not guarantee convergence to the theoretical optimum but ofer high applicability without needing any information on the problem at all but rather learn the problem landscape to search for solutions. Teir success in solving various numerical and real-world problems [7,8] made them popular and the subject of continuous investigations. Tere are many algorithms of this kind in the literature, and choosing the most suitable for a specifc problem is not an easy task [9].…”

Introductory Chapter: Ant Colony Optimization

“…The artificial ants (hence referred to as ants) then incrementally create solutions by traveling along the graph. Using the pheromone model, a set of parameters associated with graph components (nodes or edges) whose values are updated at runtime by the ants, the solution construction process is skewed in one direction [3].…”