Nature-Inspired Systems for  Parallel, Asynchronous and Decentralised Environments A Special Issue of the International Journal  Multi-Agent and Grid Systems This special issue has been published by IOS Press and is available at http://iospress.metapress.com/link.asp?id=g4kv12464308

Overview

Nature-inspired algorithms such as genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimisation and ant colony algorithms are the state-of-the-art solution technique for some problems. Furthermore, their population-based stochastic search approach promises desirable algorithm features such as anytime decentralised solution and robustness to problem change. However, the efficient pursuit of more accurate solutions leads researchers to appeal to centralised, highly tuned and sequential implementations that are only loosely related to their successful natural counterparts. This renders them brittle in the face of the dynamism of changing problem specifications and operating conditions and limits their usefulness to industry's direction of increasing distribution, decentralisation and adaptability. 

Emerging computing environments such as autonomic computing, ubiquitous computing, Peer-to-Peer systems, the Grid and the Semantic Web demand the interaction of large numbers of decentralised, parallel, asynchronous, and distributed software entities in a standardised fashion. If nature-inspired algorithms are to make an impact on these emerging computing environments, disciplined scientific and engineering investigations must be undertaken into the successful transfer of these algorithms, techniques and infrastructures into such environments.

Topics of Interest

• Methodologies:
  • Searching the vast parameter spaces of nature-inspired systems.
  • Empirical performance evaluation and benchmarking procedures.
  • Design and programming abstractions to manage the complexity of parallel, asynchronous and decentralised nature-inspired techniques
  • Software engineering techniques for parallel, asynchronous and decentralised nature-inspired systems, e.g., design patterns, component frameworks and software architectures
• Middleware for implementing algorithms in MASs:
  • Supporting nature-inspired algorithms in a decentralised, asynchronous and parallel context (e.g. pheromone infrastructures).
  • Integrating implementations within existing middleware technologies.
  • Ontologies and protocols for nature-inspired system functionality (e.g. pheromone deposition, aggregation and dispersion).
• Applications:
  • Design and development of parallel, asynchronous and decentralised applications using nature-inspired techniques
  • Applications of nature-inspired techniques in novel areas, such as (but not limited to) mobile, pervasive and grid computing
  • Scalability and performance optimisation of parallel, asynchronous and decentralised nature-inspired applications
  • Tool support for  nature-inspired techniques
• Experiences And Results:
  • New issues in the emerging computing environments context (e.g. asynchronicity, self-organisation, hyperactivity, agent redundancy, messaging costs).
  • Measures of the above.
  • Efficiency, robustness, population diversity, adaptiveness and other qualities of nature-inspired implementations.

Submissions

All researchers are invited to submit their work for consideration. Please submit your paper by e-mail to ?edcurry(at)acm.org? and unlandr@informatik.uni-essen.de with the subject line clearly identifying "NISPADE-MAGS Submission". Your submission e-mail must contain the file as a MIME attachment. The sender of the submission will be the contact person, unless otherwise requested in the submission.

Full formatting instruction for authors can be found at http://www.iospress.nl/html/15741702_ita.html

Guest Editors

• Enda Ridge, The University of York, UK. (ERidge@cs.york.ac.uk)
• Edward Curry, National University of Ireland, Galway. (EdCurry@acm.org)
• Daniel Kudenko, The University of York, UK. (Kudenko@cs.york.ac.uk)
• Dimitar Kazakov, The University of York, UK. (Kazakov@cs.york.ac.uk)

Important Dates

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