2011-09-30: Variants of Evolutionary Algorithms for Real-World Applications

For quite some time — actually more than two years — my valued colleagues Raymond Chiong and Zbigniew Michalewicz and I together have worked out the idea of and then edited the book "Variants of Evolutionary Algorithms for Real-World Applications" [d10]. The goal of the book was to gather high-quality showcases of the utility and power of Evolutionary Algorithms in real-world problems. Following the call for papers (which you can find here and several rounds of reviews and editing steps, the fourteen chapters were finalized and, as of today, published by Springer.

The official website of the book is http://www.springer.com/engineering/computational+intelligence+and+complexity/book/978-3-642-23423-1. In my publication list, you can find it under [d10].

The "about" text of the book reads as follows: Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are population-based, stochastic search algorithms that mimic natural evolution. Due to their ability to find excellent solutions for conventionally hard and dynamic problems within acceptable time, EAs have attracted interest from many researchers and practitioners in recent years. This book ?Variants of Evolutionary Algorithms for Real-World Applications? aims to promote the practitioner?s view on EAs by providing a comprehensive discussion of how EAs can be adapted to the requirements of various applications in the real-world domains. It comprises 14 chapters, including an introductory chapter re-visiting the fundamental question of what an EA is and other chapters addressing a range of real-world problems such as production process planning, inventory system and supply chain network optimisation, task-based jobs assignment, planning for CNC-based work piece construction, mechanical/ship design tasks that involve runtime-intense simulations, data mining for the prediction of soil properties, automated tissue classification for MRI images, and database query optimisation, among others. These chapters demonstrate how different types of problems can be successfully solved using variants of EAs and how the solution approaches are constructed, in a way that can be understood and reproduced with little prior knowledge on optimisation.

I want to mention that this book would have been impossible without the excellent contributions of the authors of the single chapters. Also their cooperation was really excellent. I think, I could not have been luckier with the constellation of authors and co-editors. I want to thank all of them.

See blog:2011-11-18 for publication information.