Nature That Breeds Solutions

Nature has always been a source of inspiration. Over the last few decades, it has stimulated many successful techniques, algorithms and computational applications for dealing with large, complex and dynamic real world problems. In this article, the authors discuss why nature-inspired solutions have become increasingly important and favourable for tackling the conventionally-hard problems. They also present the concepts and background of some selected examples from the domain of natural computing, and describe their key applications in business, science and engineering. Finally, the future trends are highlighted to provide a vision for the potential growth of this field.