Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Computational Intelligence in Data-Driven Optimization

The papers in this special section focus on the use of computational intelligence in data driven optimization applications. Most evolutionary algorithms and other meta-heuristic search methods typically assume that there are explicit objective functions available for fitness evaluations. In the real world, such explicit objective functions may not exist in many cases. Instead, computationally very intensive numerical simulations, such as computational fluid dynamic simulations or finite element analysis, must be conducted. In many process industry optimization problems, no analytical mathematical models exist for describing the functional relationship between the final quality of the product and the decision variables, such as temperature and humidity. Thus, only historical experimental data can be used for optimization. There are also cases where only factual data can be collected. The articles in this section aim present the most recent advances in the use of computational intelligence, in particular methodologies integrating evolutionary algorithms and other metaheuristic search methods with machine learning and neural networks, for on-line or off-line data-driven real-world optimization problems.