Arti?cial Intelligence is a ?eld with a long history, which is still very much active and developing today. Developments of new and improved techniques, together with the ever-increasing levels of available computing resources, are fueling an increasing spread of AI applications. These applications, as well as providing the economic rationale for the research, also provide the impetus to further improve the performance of our techniques. This further improvement today is most likely to come from an understanding of the ways our systems work, and therefore of their limitations, rather than from ideas ‘borrowed’ from biology. From this understanding comes improvement; from improvement comes further application; from further application comes the opportunity to further understand the limitations, and so the cycle repeats itself inde?nitely. In this volume are papers on a wide range of topics; some describe appli- tions that are only possible as a result of recent developments, others describe new developments only just being moved into practical application. All the - pers re?ect the way this ?eld continues to drive forward. This conference is the 15th in an unbroken series of annual conferences on Industrial and Engineering Application of Arti?cial Intelligence and Expert Systems organized under the auspices of the International Society of Applied Intelligence.
