We strongly believe soft computing in general, and evolutionary computing in particular, provide the right answer to many problems today, and will ever more tomorrow, for at least three good reasons:

• Hard computing often fails to solve problems because of an unnecessary emphasis on precision. If we relax precision we can achieve tractability and lower solution cost.
• Computing power is becoming cheaper and cheaper, and there is no reason to expect this trend will not continue: as more computing power is available, evolutionary techniques become more efficient and attractive, even for small customers.
• Ecology and Economy (meaning sustainable development and effective use of limited resources) will increase their importance in the years to come - expenditure on logistic, scheduling and planning improvements will increase too.