The IUTAM Symposium on Evolutionary Methods in Mechanics was held in Cracow, Poland, September 24-27, 2002. The site of the S- posium was Cracow University of Technology. The Symposium was - tended by 50 persons from 18 countries. In addition, several Polish students, Ph. D. students and research associates participated in the meeting. The Symposium provided an excellent opportunity for scholars of - chanics, computer sciences and arti?cial intelligence to interact and - change their points of view on the advanced computational and appli- tion aspects of the evolutionary methods in analysis and design of - chanical systems. Recently evolutionary methods have become the most e?ective tools for solving speci?c kinds of problems in mechanics, es- cially in structural and multidisciplinary optimization. The meeting was devotedtoboththeoreticalandpracticaldevelopmentsofcomputational mechanics methods drawing their inspiration from nature with part- ular emphasis on evolutionary models of computation such as genetic algorithms, evolutionary strategies, classi?er systems, evolutionary p- gramming and other evolutionary computation techniques in mechanics.
The objective of the Symposium was to provide an international forum forfacilitatingtheexchangeofinformationamongresearchersinvolvedin computational intelligence methods based on evolutionary nature. The Symposium put special emphasis on evolutionary optimization in va- ous?eldsof mechanics. Thesubject of evolutionary optimization has- cently experienced a remarkable growth. New concepts, approaches and applicationsarebeing continually developed and exploited to provide- ?cient tools for solving a variety of optimization problems in mechanics.