Agent based evolutionary search is an emerging paradigm in computational
int- ligence offering the potential to conceptualize and solve a variety
of complex problems such as currency trading, production planning,
disaster response m- agement, business process management etc. There has
been a significant growth in the number of publications related to the
development and applications of agent based systems in recent years
which has prompted special issues of journals and dedicated sessions in
premier conferences. The notion of an agent with its ability to sense,
learn and act autonomously - lows the development of a plethora of
efficient algorithms to deal with complex problems. This notion of an
agent differs significantly from a restrictive definition of a solution
in an evolutionary algorithm and opens up the possibility to model and
capture emergent behavior of complex systems through a natural age-
oriented decomposition of the problem space. While this flexibility of
represen- tion offered by agent based systems is widely acknowledged,
they need to be - signed for specific purposes capturing the right level
of details and description. This edited volume is aimed to provide the
readers with a brief background of agent based evolutionary search,
recent developments and studies dealing with various levels of
information abstraction and applications of agent based evo- tionary
systems. There are 12 peer reviewed chapters in this book authored by d-
tinguished researchers who have shared their experience and findings
spanning across a wide range of applications.
