The purpose of this book is to present the main metaheuristics
and approximate and stochastic methods for optimization of complex
systems in Engineering Sciences. It has been written within the
framework of the European Union project ERRIC (Empowering Romanian
Research on Intelligent Information Technologies), which is funded
by the EU's FP7 Research Potential program and has been
developed in co-operation between French and Romanian teaching
researchers. Through the principles of various proposed algorithms
(with additional references) this book allows the reader to explore
various methods of implementation such as metaheuristics, local
search and populationbased methods. It examines multi-objective and
stochastic optimization, as well as methods and tools for
computer-aided decision-making and simulation for
decision-making.