This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence, ANTS 2008, held in Brussels, Belgium, in September 2008. The 17 revised full papers, 24 revised short papers, and 10 extended abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 91 submissions. The papers cover theoretical and foundational aspects of computational intelligence and related disciplines with special focus on swarm intelligence and are devoted to behavioral models of social insects and new algorithmic approaches, empirical and theoretical research in swarm intelligence, applications such as ant colony optimization or particle swarm optimization, and theoretical and experimental research in swarm robotics systems.
The series of biannual international conferences “ANTS – International C- ference on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence”, now in its sixth edition, was started ten years ago, with the organization of ANTS’98. As some readers might recall, the first edition of ANTS was titled “ANTS’98 – From Ant Colonies to Artificial Ants: First International Workshop on Ant Colony Op- mization. ” In fact, at that time the focus was mainly on ant colony optimization (ACO), the first swarm intelligence algorithm to go beyond a pure scientific interest and to enter the realm of real-world applications. Interestingly, in the ten years after the first edition there has been a gr- ing interest not only for ACO, but for a number of other studies that belong more generally to the area of swarmintelligence. The rapid growth of the swarm intelligence field is attested by a number of indicators. First, the number of s- missions and participants to the ANTS conferences has steadily increased over the years. Second, a number of international conferences in computational - intelligence and related disciplines organize workshops on subjects such as swarm intelligence, ant algorithms, ant colony optimization, and particle swarm op- mization. Third, IEEE startedorganizing,in 2003, the IEEE SwarmIntelligence Symposium (in order to maintain unity in this growing field, we are currently establishing a cooperation agreement between IEEE SISandANTSsoastohave 1 IEEE SIS in odd years and ANTS in even years). Last, the Swarm Intelligence journal was born.