Metaheuristics exhibit desirable properties like simplicity, easy parallelizability, and ready applicability to different types of optimization problems. After a comprehensive introduction to the field, the contributed chapters in this book include explanations of the main metaheuristics techniques, including simulated annealing, tabu search, evolutionary algorithms, artificial ants, and particle swarms, followed by chapters that demonstrate their applications to problems such as multiobjective optimization, logistics, vehicle routing, and air traffic management. 

The authors are leading researchers in this domain, with considerable teaching and applications experience, and the book will be of value to industrial practitioners, graduate students, and research academics.

Patrick Siarry is a Professor of Automatics and Informatics at the University of Paris-Est Créteil, where he leads the Image and Signal Processing team in the Laboratoire Images, Signaux et Systèmes Intelligents (LiSSi). He has considerable teaching, research and writing experience in the areas of signal processing, control, artificial intelligence, operations research, and optimization. He presently serves as an Associate Editor of the journal Information Sciences and the journal Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence.