Marco Dorigo is a research director of the FNRS, the Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research, and co-director of IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence laboratory of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. He is the inventor of the ant colony optimization metaheuristic. His current research interests include swarm intelligence, swarm robotics, and metaheuristics for discrete optimization. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Swarm Intelligence, and an Associate Editor or member of the Editorial Boards of many journals on computational intelligence and adaptive systems. Dr. Dorigo is a Fellow of the ECCAI and of the IEEE. He was awarded the Italian Prize for Artificial Intelligence in 1996, the Marie Curie Excellence Award in 2003, the Dr. A. De Leeuw-Damry-Bourlart award in applied sciences in 2005, the Cajastur ""Mamdani"" International Prize for Soft Computing in 2007, and an ERC Advanced Grant in 2010. Thomas St tzle is Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Darmstadt University of Technology.
Marco Dorigo and Thomas Stutzle impressively demonstrate that the importance of ant behavior reaches far beyond the sociobiological domain. Ant Colony Optimization presents the most successful algorithmic techniques to be developed on the basis on ant behavior. This book will certainly open the gates for new experimental work on decision making, division of labor, and communication; moreover, it will also inspire all those studying patterns of self-organization. --Bert Holldobler, Professor of Behavioral Physiology and Sociobiology, Biozentrum, University of Wurzburg, Germany Inspired by the remarkable ability of social insects to solve problems, Dorigo and Stutzle introduce highly creative new technological design principles for seeking optimized solutions to extremely difficult real-world problems, such as network routing and task scheduling. This is essential reading not only for those working in artificial intelligence and optimization, but for all of us who find the interface between biology and technology fascinating. --Iain D. Couzin, Princeton University and University of Oxford