The Power of Natural Inspiration in Control Systems

Throughout history, nature has always been an inspiration for mankind. It is not an exaggeration to say that almost every human invention, from engineering to social sciences, has been an attempt to replicate nature. In fact, nature continues to play an important roll in different human activities. From a scientific perspective, nature-inspired methods have proven to be an efficient tool for tackling real-life problems that are difficult to solve because of their high complexity or the limitation of resources to analyze them. The core idea is the fact that several natural phenomena, from simple to complex, always try to optimize certain parameters. Thus, this chapter gives an overview of nature-inspired methods from computational point of view, and summarizes key contributions of this book that focuses on methods that can simulate natural phenomena using computers, and the benefits of applying this methodology to the analysis and design of engineering control systems. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.