Social insects such as ants and termites can be viewed as powerful problem-solving systems with sophisticated collective intelligence. Composed of simple interacting agents, this intelligence lies in the networks of interactions among individuals and between individuals and the environment. Social insects are also a powerful metaphor for artificial intelligence. The problems they solve - for instance, finding food, dividing labor among nestmates, building nests, and responding to external challenges - have important counterparts in engineering and computer science. This book provides a detailed look at models of social insect behaviour and how these can be applied in the design of complex systems. It draws upon a complementary blend of biology and computer science, including artificial intelligence, robotics, operations research, informationdisplay, and computer graphics. The book should appeal to a broadly interdisciplinary audience of modellers, engineers, neuroscientists, and computer scientists, as well as some biologists and ecologists.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, ANTS 2018, held in Rome, Italy, in October 2018. The 24 full papers and 12 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 69 submissions. They are devoted to the field of swarm intelligence as a whole, without any bias towards specific research directions.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, held in Brussels, Belgium, in September 2014. This volume contains 17 full papers, 9 short papers, and 7 extended abstracts carefully selected out of 55 submissions. The papers cover empirical and theoretical research in swarm intelligence such as: behavioral models of social insects or other animal societies, ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, swarm robotics systems.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, held in Brussels, Belgium, in September 2012. This volume contains 15 full papers, 20 short papers, and 7 extended abstracts carefully selected out of 81 submissions. The papers cover various topics of swarm intelligence.

The series of biannual international conferences "ANTS - International C- ference on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence", now in its sixth edition, was started ten years ago, with the organization of ANTS'98. As some readers might recall, the ?rst edition of ANTS was titled "ANTS'98 - From Ant Colonies to Arti?cial Ants: First International Workshop on Ant Colony Op- mization. " In fact, at that time the focus was mainly on ant colony optimization (ACO), the ?rst swarm intelligence algorithm to go beyond a pure scienti?c interest and to enter the realm of real-world applications. Interestingly, in the ten years after the ?rst edition there has been a gr- ing interest not only for ACO, but for a number of other studies that belong more generally to the area of swarmintelligence. The rapid growth of the swarm intelligence ?eld is attested by a number of indicators. First, the number of s- missions and participants to the ANTS conferences has steadily increased over the years. Second, a number of international conferences in computational - telligence and related disciplines organize workshops on subjects such as swarm intelligence, ant algorithms, ant colony optimization, and particle swarm op- mization. Third, IEEE startedorganizing,in 2003,the IEEE SwarmIntelligence Symposium (in order to maintain unity in this growing ?eld, we are currently establishingacooperationagreementbetweenIEEE SISandANTSsoastohave 1 IEEE SIS in odd years and ANTS in even years). Last, the Swarm Intelligence journal was born.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence, ANTS 2006, held in Brussels, Belgium, in September 2006.

The 27 revised full papers, 23 revised short papers, and 12 extended abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 115 submissions. The papers are devoted to theoretical and foundational aspects of ant algorithms, evolutionary optimization, ant colony optimization, and swarm intelligence and deal with a broad variety of optimization applications in networking, operations research, multiagent systems, robot systems, networking, etc.

1 With its fourth edition, the ANTS series of workshops has changed its name. Theoriginal"ANTS-FromAntColoniestoArti?cialAnts: InternationalWo- shop on Ant Algorithms" has become "ANTS - International Workshop on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence." This change is mainly due to the following reasons. First, the term "ant algorithms" was slower in spreading in the research community than the term "swarm intelligence," while at the sametime research inso-calledswarm robotics wasthesubjectofincreasingactivity: itwastherefore an obvious choice to substitute the term ant algorithms with the more accepted and used term swarm intelligence. Second, although swarm intelligence research has undoubtedly produced a 2 number of interesting and promising research directions, we think it is fair to say that its most successful strand is the one known as "ant colony optimi- tion."Ant colony optimization, ?rst introducedin the early1990sasa noveltool fortheapproximatesolutionofdiscreteoptimizationproblems, hasrecentlyseen an explosion in the number of its applications, both to academic and real-world problems, and is currently being extended to the realm of continuous optimi- tion (a few papers on this subject being published in these proceedings). It is therefore a reasonable choice to have the term ant colony optimization as part of the workshop name.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Ant Algorithms, ANTS 2002, held in Brussels, Belgium in September 2002.The 17 revised full papers, 11 short papers, and extended poster abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 submissions. The papers deal with theoretical and foundational aspects and a variety of new variants of ant algorithms as well as with a broad variety of optimization applications in networking and operations research. All in all, this book presents the state of the art in research and development in the emerging field of ant algorithms

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, ANTS 2020, held online -due to COVID-19- in Barcelona Spain, in October 2020. The 20 full papers presented , together with 8 short papers and 5 extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 submissions. ANTS 2020 contributions are dealing with any aspect of swarm intelligence.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, ANTS 2022, held in Malaga, Spain, in November 2022. The 19 full papers presented, together with 14 short papers and 4 extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. ANTS 2022 contributions are dealing with any aspect of swarm intelligence such as behavioral models of social insects, empirical and theoretical research in swarm intelligence, application of swarm intelligence methods, and much more.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, ANTS 2016, held in Brussels, Belgium, in September 2016. The 18 full papers and 7 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 47 submissions. They are devoted to the field of swarm intelligence as a whole, without any bias towards specific research directions.

Social insects such as ants and termites can be viewed as powerful problem-solving systems with sophisticated collective intelligence. Composed of simple interacting agents, this intelligence lies in the networks of interactions among individuals and between individuals and the environment. Social insects are also a powerful metaphor for artificial intelligence. The problems they solve - for instance, finding food, dividing labor among nestmates, building nests, and responding to external challenges - have important counterparts in engineering and computer science. This book provides a detailed look at models of social insect behaviour and how these can be applied in the design of complex systems. It draws upon a complementary blend of biology and computer science, including artificial intelligence, robotics, operations research, information display, and computer graphics. The book should appeal to a broadly interdisciplinary audience of modellers, engineers, neuroscientists, and computer scientists, as well as some biologists and ecologists.