Advances in applied artificial intelligence

“Intelligent Design and complex problem solving are twined like wife and husband.” In the current competitive global industrial environment there are many pr- lems which need intelligent systems technology for optimal solutions. The central theme of the 19th International Conference on Industrial, Engineering & Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems (IEA/AIE 2006) is to focus on the research methodologies and practical implementations of these methodologies for intelligent solutions of problems in real-world applications. We are pleased to present the papers in these proceedings which cover va- ous aspects of applications of applied intelligent systems. We received more than 330 papers from many countries and each paper was reviewed by at least two reviewers. Only 134 papers were selected for presentation in the normal and special sessions. The normal sessions cover the following topics: planning and scheduling, multi-agent systems, fuzzy logic, data mining and knowledge d- covery, genetic algorithms, decision support, expert systems, neural networks, computer vision, speech recognition, systems for real-life applications, machine learning, model-based reasoning, heuristic search, and knowledge engineering. We also organized several special sessions in the areas of bioinformatics, - tology, knowledge discovery, intelligent control systems, intelligent industrial s- tems, and applications of data mining. The conference program also included four invited lecturers given by Fausto Giunchiglia, Erik Sandewall, Sylviane Gentil and Trevor Martin.