Special issue: Hybrid approaches for approximate reasoning

Abstract

Nature inspired computation is a general term referring to computing inspired by nature. It is an emerging interdisciplinary area and so far a range of techniques and methods are studied for dealing with large, complex, and dynamic problems. The idea is to mimic (concepts, principles and mechanisms) the complex phenomena occurring in the nature as computational processes in order to enhance the way computation is performed mainly from a problem solving point of view. Some of the key paradigms falling under this umbrella are neurocomputing, evolutionary computing, swarm intelligence, membrane computing, artificial immune systems, DNA computation, artificial life and so on. The recent trend is to formulate adaptive nature inspired computational models combining different knowledge representation schemes, decision making models and learning strategies to solve a computational task. This integration aims at overcoming limitations of individual techniques through hybridization or fusion of various techniques.