Guest editorial: special issue on nature inspired cooperative strategies for optimization

Abstract

Nature inspired computing is nowadays part of a global emerging paradigm. Diverse biological processes, natural evolution and other complex cooperative systems in nature have always been a fruitful source of inspiration for computer science leading to the development of highly effective problem solving algorithms and computing strategies. Well known examples include evolutionary algorithms, ant colony optimization, artificial immune systems, particle swarm optimization, membrane computing and artificial bee colonies. The current special issue contains the extended versions of the best research papers presented at the V International Workshop on Nature Inspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimization (NICSO) held on October 2011 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The aim of NICSO is to provide an inspiring environment for debating the state of the art ideas and techniques in nature inspired cooperative strategies and theirmost recent applications. The topics covered by NICSO2011 include swarm intelligence, genetic algorithms, multiagent systems, coevolution and cooperation strategies, adversarial models, synergic building blocks, complex networks, social impact models, evolutionary design, self organized criticality, evolving systems, cellular automata, hybrid algorithms and membrane computing. The papers included in this collection contain research results of new swarm intelligence models, genetic and