Intelligent computing in science and technology

This special issue features six selected papers with high quality. The first article, ‘‘Binary monkey algorithm for approximate packing non-congruent circles in a rectangular container, authored by Rafael Torres-Escobar, José Antonio Marmolejo-Saucedo and Igor Litvinchev, proposed the packing problem for non-congruent (different size) circles with the binary version of the monkey algorithm which incorporates a cooperation process and a greedy strategy. The authors use a rectangular grid for covering the container. Every node in the grid represent potential positions for a circle. In this sense, binary monkey algorithm for the knapsack problem, can be used to solve de 0–1 approximate packing problem for non-congruent circles. The binary monkey problem uses two additional processes of the original monkey algorithm, these two processes are a greedy process and a cooperation process.