Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence: 4th International Workshop, ANTS 2004, Brussels, Belgium, September 5-8, 2004, Proceeding (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

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.