Swarm Intelligence is an AI technique that focuses on studying the collective behaviour of a decentralised system made up by a population of simple agents interacting locally with each other and with the environment. Although there is typically no centralised control dictating the behaviour of the agents, local interactions among the agents often cause a global pattern to emerge. Examples of systems like this can be found abundant in nature, including ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, honey bees, bacteria, and many more. This kind of "swarm-like" algorithm, such as Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), have already been applied successfully to solve real-world optimization problems in engineering and telecommunication. SI models have many features in common with Evolutionary Algorithms. Like EA, SI models are population-based. The system is initialised with a population of individuals (i.e., potential solutions). These individuals are then manipulated over many generations by ways of mimicking social behaviour of insects or animals, in an effort to find the optima. Unlike EA, SI models do not use evolutionary operators such as crossover and mutation. A potential solution simply "flies" through the search space by modifying itself according to its relationship with other individuals in the population and the environment.

This special session will highlight the latest development in this rapidly growing research area of Swarm Intelligence. Authors are invited to submit their original and unpublished work in the areas including (but not limited to) the following:

• Particle swarm optimization
• Ant colony optimization
• Artificial life
• Culture algorithm
• Ecologically inspired models
• Other nature-inspired computation techniques
• Multi-objective optimization
• Constrained optimization
• Scheduling
• Real world applications

Papers should follow the formatting guidelines for CEC2003 regular papers, and should be submitted directly to the session organizers for review. A submission should not be over 8 pages. This includes all figures, tables, graphs, photos, and bibliography entries. Extra pages may be purchased at US$100 each. Special session papers are treated the same as regular conference papers, and will be included in the conference proceedings.

It is preferable that you email your submission in Adobe PDF format directly to the special session organizer xiaodong@cs.rmit.edu.au. DO NOT submit papers through the standard CEC2003 procedure. Please double check the as-printed appearance of your paper before sending it.

Organizers:

James Kennedy (Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, USA)

Maurice Clerc (France Telecom, France)

Gerry Dozier (Auburn University, USA)

Anthony Carlisle (Huntingdon College, USA)

Jonathan Fieldsend (University of Exeter, UK)

Xiaohui Hu (Purdue University, USA)

Gao Liang (Huazhong University of Science & Technology, China)

Gao Haibing (Huazhong University of Science & Technology, China)

Hussein A. Abbass (ADFA, UNSW, Australia)

Marcus Randall (Bond University, Australia)

Konstantinos Parsopoulos (University of Patras, Greece)

Hiro Yoshida(University of Chicago,USA) 
Hitoshi Iba(University of Tokyo,Japan)
Kazuhiro Saitou(University of Michigan,USA)
Carlos.Penha(Swiss Federal Institute of Technology,Switzerland)

Xiaodong Li (RMIT University, Australia)

Important dates:

Submission: June 23, 2003
Notification Acceptance: August 9, 2003
Camera-Ready: September 9, 2003
Conference: December 8-12, 2003