Recent advances in soft computing and its applications

We have a great pleasure to presenting a special issue of the 4 International Conference on Harmony Search, Soft Computing and Applications (ICHSA 2018) organised by BML Munjal University, Gurugram, India during 7 February 2019 to 9 February 2019. ICHSA 2018 was the forum to bring together the researchers and academicians working in the area of soft computing on a single platform. The forum provided an opportunity for exchange of the researches and insights from scientists and scholars thereby promoting research, development and use of soft computing techniques in the real life engineering problems. The conference was a huge success and it was supported by various national and international scientific societies. The theme of the conference was soft computing techniques and their applications to real life problems. A number of researchers presented their research during the conference. The 2018 edition of ICHSA attracts total 220 research article submissions spanning over numerous active and emerging areas of the soft computing, evolutionary algorithms, and swarm intelligence techniques along with various real life problems. The conference proceeding was published by the Advances in Intelligent Systems, Springer (Yadav, Yadav, Bansal, Deep, & Kim, 2018). Four extended articles among all accepted article are selected for the special issue ‘Recent Advances in Soft Computing and Its Applications’ in the Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence. The first article entitled ‘Stability and iterative convergence of water cycle algorithm for computationally expensive and combinatorial Internet shopping optimization problems’ is the combination of the theoretical as well as experimental work on Water Cycle Algorithm. Further this issue provides a state-of-the-art review composition on Harmony Search Algorithm and its application in energy systems. The third article entitled ‘An opposition based chaotic grey wolf optimizer for global optimization tasks’ proposes a new variant of grey wolf optimizer for the function optimisation, finally the fourth article entitled ‘Butterfly-Fat-Tree Topology based Fault-Tolerant Network-on-Chip Design using Particle Swarm Optimization’ gives a different topological based PSO algorithm which has been utilised for chip design. The selection of these article presents a versatile study on soft computing methodologies, they represents different corners of the optimisation schemes for various purposes. It shows the active engagement of the ICHSA community in the service towards research in soft computing. We hope that the readers will enjoy this special issue.