This volume is based on the workshop"Modelling in Molecular Biology" that tookplacein2002inSingapore. Themaingoaloftheworkshopwastopresent models/methods used in solving some fundamental problems in biosciences. The volume consists of a selection of papers presented at the workshop as well as of some other papers that are included so that the presentation of the theme of the workshop is broader and more balanced. As a matter of fact we feel that the collection of papers comprising this volume represents a wide spectrum of quite diverse ideas and trends. The paper by D. A. Beard et al....

Taking inspiration from self-awareness in humans, this book introduces the new notion of computational self-awareness as a fundamental concept for designing and operating computing systems.

At the beginning of the 1990s research started in how to combine soft comput- ing with reconfigurable hardware in a quite unique way. One of the methods that was developed has been called evolvable hardware. Thanks to evolution- ary algorithms researchers have started to evolve electronic circuits routinely. A number of interesting circuits - with features unreachable by means of con- ventional techniques - have been developed. Evolvable hardware is quite pop- ular right now; more than fifty research groups are spread out over the world. Evolvable hardware has become a part of the curriculum...

Membrane computing is an unconventional model of computation associated with a new computing paradigm. The field of membrane computing was initiated in 1998 by the author of this book; it is a branch of natural computing inspired by the structure and functioning of the living cell and devises distributed parallel computing models in the form of membrane systems. This book is the first monograph surveying the new field in a systematic and coherent way. It presents the central notions and results: the main classes of P systems, the main results about their computational power and efficiency, a...

The design of formal calculi in which fundamental concepts underlying interactive systems can be described and studied has been a central theme of theoretical computer science in recent decades, while membrane computing, a rule-based formalism inspired by biological cells, is a more recent field that belongs to the general area of natural computing. This is the first book to establish a link between these two research directions while treating mobility as the central topic. In the first chapter the authors offer a formal description of mobility in process calculi, noting the entities that...

This volume, which includes the author's own software package, tracks the development of evolutionary computation since 1990, with detailed evaluations of key approaches, pseudocode representations of each algorithm, and industry-applicable BBOB benchmarking.

The term evolutionary computing refers to the study of the foundations and applications of certain heuristic techniques based on the principles of natural evolution; thus the aim of designing evolutionary algorithms (EAs) is to mimic some of the processes taking place in natural evolution. These algo- rithms are classified into three main categories, depending more on historical development than on major functional techniques. In fact, their biological basis is essentially the same. Hence EC = GA uGP u ES uEP EC = Evolutionary Computing GA = Genetic Algorithms, GP = Genetic Programming ES =...

The study of the genetic basis for evolution has flourished in this century, as well as our understanding of the evolvability and programmability of biological systems. Genetic algorithms meanwhile grew out of the realization that a computer program could use the biologically-inspired processes of mutation, recombination, and selection to solve hard optimization problems. Genetic and evolutionary programming provide further approaches to a wide variety of computational problems. A synthesis of these experiences reveals fundamental insights into both the computational nature of biological...

The field of research covered by this book is niching/multimodal optimization, with an emphasis on evolutionary computation methods, explaining the state of the art and relating this research to a model-based view of the basin identification problem. The algorithms suggested by the author are compared to alternative recent methods on current benchmarks. This book is useful for researchers and practitioners in the area of evolutionary computing.