This book contains a selection of papers that were initially presented at the 4th On-Line World Conference on Soft Computing in Industrial Applications that was held in September 1999. Soft Computing provides various methodologies for developing intelligent systems that offer competitive solutions to real world problems. This book is comprised of a unique collection of papers that provide a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art-theory and sucessful industrial applications of soft computing around the world. It is written by some of the leading researchers in this field. This book is aimed at researchers and professional engineers who are engaged in developing intelligent systems as well as graduate students in science and engineering.

Symbolic processing has limitations highlighted by the symbol grounding problem. Computational processing methods, like fuzzy logic, neural networks, and statistical methods have appeared to overcome these problems. However, they also suffer from drawbacks in that, for example, multi-stage inference is difficult to implement. Deep fusion of symbolic and computational processing is expected to open a new paradigm for intelligent systems. Symbolic processing and computational processing should interact at all abstract or computational levels. For this undertaking, attempts to combine, hybridize, and fuse these processing methods should be thoroughly investigated and the direction of novel fusion approaches should be clarified. This book contains the current status of this attempt and also discusses future directions.

This volume contains selected papers presented at the Second Asia-Paci c C- ference on Simulated Evolution and Learning (SEAL'98), from 24 to 27 Nov- ber 1998, in Canberra, Australia. SEAL'98 received a total of 92 submissions (67 papers for the regular sessions and 25 for the applications sessions). All papers were reviewed by three independent reviewers. After review, 62 papers were - cepted for oral presentation and 13 for poster presentation. Some of the accepted papers were selected for inclusion in this volume. SEAL'98 also featured a fully refereed special session on Evolutionary Computation in Power Engineering - ganised by Professor Kit Po Wong and Dr Loi Lei Lai. Two of the ve accepted papers are included in this volume. The papers included in these proceedings cover a wide range of topics in simulated evolution and learning, from self-adaptation to dynamic modelling, from reinforcement learning to agent systems, from evolutionary games to e- lutionary economics, and from novel theoretical results to successful applications, among others. SEAL'98 attracted 94 participants from 14 di erent countries, namely A- tralia, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Iceland, India, Japan, South Korea, New Z- land, Portugal, Sweden, Taiwan, UK and the USA. It had three distinguished international scientists as keynote speakers, giving talks on natural computation (Hans-Paul Schwefel), reinforcement learning (Richard Sutton), and novel m- els in evolutionary design (John Gero). More information about SEAL'98 is still available at http: //www.cs.adfa.edu.au/conference/seal98/.

Advances in Soft Computing contains the most recent developments in the field of soft computing in engineering design and manufacture. The book comprises a selection of papers that were first presented in June 1998 at the 3rd On-line World Conference on Soft Computing in Engineering Design and Manufacturing. Amongst these are four invited papers by World-renowned researchers in the field. Soft computing is a collection of methodologies which aim to exploit tolerance for imprecision, uncertainty and partial truth to achieve tractability, robustness and low solution cost. The area of applications of soft computing is extensive. Principally the constituents of soft computing are: fuzzy computing, neuro-computing, genetic computing and probabilistic computing. The topics in this book are well focused on engineering design an d manufacturing. This broad collection of 43 research papers, has been arranged into nine parts by the editors. These include: Design Support Systems, Intelligent Control, Data Mining and New Topics in EA basics. The papers on evolutionary design and optimisation are of particular interest. Innovative techniques are explored and the reader is introduced to new, highly advanced research results. The editors present a unique collection of papers that provide a comprehensive overview of current developments in soft computing research around the world.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference documentation of the First Asia-Pacific Conference on Simulated Evolution and Learning, SEAL'96, held in Taejon, Korea, in November 1996.
The 23 revised full papers were selected for inclusion in this book on the basis of 2 rounds of reviewing and improvements. Also included are invited papers by John L. Casti and Lawrence J. Fogel. The volume covers a wide range of current topics in simulated evolution and learning e.g. evolutionary optimization, evolutionary learning, artificial life, hybrid evolutionary fuzzy systems, evolutionary artificial neural networks, co-evolution, novel evolutionary approaches to computer tomography image reconstruction, power systems load flow control, and water flow control in cropped soils.

This book presents 14 rigorously reviewed revised papers selected from more than 50 submissions for the 1994 IEEE/ Nagoya-University World Wisepersons Workshop, WWW'94, held in August 1994 in Nagoya, Japan.The combination of approaches based on fuzzy logic, neural networks and genetic algorithms are expected to open a new paradigm of machine learning for the realization of human-like information processing systems. The first six papers in this volume are devoted to the combination of fuzzy logic and neural networks; four papers are on how to combine fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms. Four papers investigate challenging applications of fuzzy systems and of fuzzy-genetic algorithms.

This book includes a selection of twelve carefully revised papers chosen from the papers accepted for presentation at the 4th IEEE/Nagoya-University World Wisepersons Workshop held in Nagoya in November 1995.
The combining of the technologies of fuzzy logic, neural networks, and evolutionary computation is expected to open up a new paradigm of machine learning for the realization of human-like information generating systems. The excellent papers presented are organized in sections on fuzzy and evolutionary computation, fuzzy and learning automata, fuzzy and neural networks, genetic algorithms, and CAM-brain.