This volume of Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing contains accepted papers presented at WSC17, the 17th Online World Conference on Soft Computing in Industrial Applications, held from December 2012 to January 2013 on the Internet. WSC17 continues a successful series of scientific events started over a decade ago by the World Federation of Soft Computing. It brought together researchers from over the world interested in the ever advancing state of the art in the field. Continuous technological improvements make this online forum a viable gathering format for a world class...

We often come across computational optimization virtually in all branches of engineering and industry.Many engineering problems involve heuristic search and optimization, and, once discretized, may become combinatorial in nature, which gives rise to certain difficulties in terms of solution procedure. Some of these problems have enormous search spaces, are NP-hard and hence require heuristic solution techniques. Another difficulty is the lack of ability of classical solution techniques to determine appropriate optima of non-convex problems. Under these conditions, recent advances in...