Sustainable Development (SD) has become a global priority, addressing critical challenges like climate change, natural risk management, renewable energy, resource management, healthcare, and resilient urban development. Since the UN introduced the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, SD has grown to encompass social, economic, and environmental aspects of human progress.

Technological innovations, particularly Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), have been key in advancing SDGs through smart cities, smart grids, e-learning, telemedicine, and other innovations. Many of these advancements are powered by Computational Intelligence (CI) techniques, including evolutionary computation and nature-inspired approaches, which are well-suited for solving complex real-world problems.

The application of nature-inspired techniques to sustainability is a fast-growing field, yielding innovative solutions in areas like wind farm optimization, land use, water distribution, smart grids, and AI-driven decision support in healthcare.

This special session seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners to explore the latest advancements in applying Computational Intelligence to sustainability, with a focus on methodologies that directly or indirectly address one or more SDGs (https://sdgs.un.org/goals).

Topics of Interest

  • Renewable Energy Systems: Optimization of energy generation, distribution, and storage.
  • Smart Cities: Design and management of resilient, sustainable urban environments.
  • Agriculture and Food Security: Sustainable farming practices, precision agriculture, and food supply chain optimization.
  • Environmental Monitoring and Management: Applications in pollution control, conservation, and natural resource management.
  • Healthcare and Well-being: AI-driven diagnostics, telemedicine, and optimization of healthcare systems.
  • Water Resources Management: Efficient distribution, usage, and conservation of water resources.
  • Sustainable Manufacturing and Industry 4.0: Green manufacturing processes, waste reduction, and lifecycle assessment.
  • Risk Reduction and Management: Early warning systems for natural disasters, climate change risk assessment, response optimization, and resilience building.
  • Circular Economy: Strategies for waste minimization, recycling, and sustainable product design.

We welcome original research, review articles, and case studies that demonstrate the potential of Computational Intelligence to create sustainable solutions and drive progress toward the SDGs. Contributions that highlight interdisciplinary approaches and real-world implementations are particularly encouraged.

    Organisers

    • Valentino Santucci
      Universitá per Stranieri di Perugia, Italy
      valentino.santucci(at)unistrapg.it
    • Fabio Caraffini
      Swansea University, UK
      Fabio.caraffini(at)swansea.ac.uk
    • Jamal Toutouh 
      University of Malaga, Spain
      jamal(at)uma.es