Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Nature Inspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimization (Part II)

Nature is an unlimited source of resilient, robust, fine tuned,complex mechanisms and phenomena which have been thesubject of exploration and exploitation in science and engi-neering. In particular, understanding complex cooperativesystems in nature has driven computer scientists and prac-titionerstooutstandingdevelopmentsrangingfromversatilemodels and architectures to highly effective methodologiesand computing strategies. Examples of these include, butare not limited to, artificial bee colony, memetic-computingagent-models, bacteria metabolism inspired robot control-lers, evolutionary design optimization, particle swarm opti-mization, emergent collective robotics behavior to name butafew.This thematic issue brings a selection of the best researchworkspublishedintheIVInternationalWorkshoponNatureInspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimization (NICSO)held on May 2010 in Granada, Spain. The aim of NICSO istobringtogetherscientistsfromallovertheworldtodiscussthe latest ideas and state of the art on nature inspired coop-erative strategies. As in its previous editions, NICSO 2010hascoveredtopicsrelatedtoadaptivebehavior,antcolonies,amorphous computing, artificial life, bio-inspired architec-tures, distributed computing, evolutionary robotics, evolv-ablesystems,membranecomputing,softwareself-assembly,evolutionary computation, swarm intelligence and quantum