Systems designers have learned that many agents co-operating within the system can solve very complex problems with a minimal design effort. In general, multi-agent systems that use swarm intelligence are said to be swarm intelligent systems. Today, these are mostly used as search engines and optimization tools. This volume reviews innovative methodologies of swarm intelligence, outlines the foundations of engineering swarm intelligent systems and applications, and relates experiences using the particle swarm optimisation.

Systems designers have learned that many agents co-operating within the system can solve very complex problems with a minimal design effort. In general, multi-agent systems that use swarm intelligence are said to be swarm intelligent systems. Today, these are mostly used as search engines and optimization tools. This volume reviews innovative methodologies of swarm intelligence, outlines the foundations of engineering swarm intelligent systems and applications, and relates experiences using the particle swarm optimisation.

Cryptography is the study of methods to transform information from its original comprehensible form into a scrambled incomprehensible form, such that its content can only be disclosed to some qualified persons. In the past, cryptography helped ensure secrecy in important communications, such as those of spies, military leaders, and diplomats. In recent decades, it has expanded in two main ways: firstly, it provides mechanisms for more than just keeping secrets through schemes like digital signatures, digital cash, etc; secondly, cryptography is used by almost all computer users as it is embedded into the infrastructure for computing and telecommunications. Cryptography ensures secure communications through confidentiality, integrity, authenticity and non-repudiation. Cryptography has evolved over the years from Julius Cesar's cipher, which simply shifts the letters of the words a fixed number of times, to the sophisticated RSA algorithm, which was invented by Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman, and the elegant AES cipher (Advanced Encryption Standard), which was invented by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. The need for fast but secure cryptographic systems is growing bigger. Therefore, dedicated hardware for cryptography is becoming a key issue for designers. With the spread of reconfigurable hardware such as FPGAs, embedded cryptographic hardware became cost-effective. Nevertheless, it is worthy to note that nowadays, even hardwired cryptographic algorithms are not safe. Attacks based on power consumption and electromagnetic Analysis, such as SPA, DPA and EMA have been successfully used to retrieve secret information stored in cryptographic devices. Besides performance in terms of area and throughput, designer of embedded cryptographic hardware must worry about the leakage of their implementations. The content of this book is divided into three main parts, which are focused on new trends in cryptographic hardware, arithmetic and factoring.

Swarm intelligence is an innovative computational way to solve hard problems. This discipline is inspired by the behaviour of social insect (e.g. ants, termites, bees and wasps) colonies as well as fish schools and bird flocks. The content of this book is divided into two main parts: ant colony optimisation and particle swarm optimisation. The former describes systems that have been engineered using ant colony optimisation and the latter presents systems that were designed based on particle swarm optimisation.

Real-world engineering problems often require concurrent optimisation of several design objectives, which are conflicting in most of the cases. Such an optimisation is generally called multi-objective or multi-criterion optimisation. The area of research that applies evolutionary methodologies to multi-objective optimisation is of special and growing interest. It brings a solution to many yet-opened real-world problems and questions. Generally, multi-objective engineering problems have no single optimal design, but several solutions of equal efficiency allowing different trade-offs. The decision maker's preferences are normally used to select the most adequate design. Such preferences may be dictated before or after the optimisation takes place. They may also be introduced interactively at different levels of the optimisation process. Multi-objective optimisation methods can be subdivided into classical and evolutionary. The classical methods usually aim at a single solution while the evolutionary methods target a whole set of so-called Pareto-optimal solutions. The aim of this book is to provide a representation of the state-of-the-art of the evolutionary multi-objective optimisation research area and related new trends. Furthermore, it reports many innovative designs yielded by the application of such optimisation methods. The contents of the book are divided into two main parts: evolutionary multi-objective optimisation and evolutionary multi-objective designs.

Modern cryptology, which is the basis of information security techniques, started in the late 70's and developed in the 80's. As communication networks were spreading deep into society, the need for secure communication greatly promoted cryptographic research. The need for fast but secure cryptographic systems is growing bigger. Therefore, dedicated systems for cryptography are becoming a key issue for designers. With the spread of reconfigurable hardware such as FPGAs, hardware implementations of cryptographic algorithms become cost-effective. The focus of this book is on all aspects of embedded cryptographic hardware. Of special interest are contributions that describe new secure and fast hardware implementations and new efficient algorithms, methodologies and protocols for secure communications. This book is organised in two parts. The first part is dedicated to embedded hardware of cryptosystems while the second part focuses on new algorithms for cryptography, design methodologies and secure protocols.