We are proud to introduce the proceedings of the Seventh International C- ference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN VII, held in Granada, Spain, on 7–11 September 2002. PPSN VII was organized back-to-back with the Foundations of Genetic Algorithms (FOGA) conference, which took place in Torremolinos, Malaga, Spain, in the preceding week. The PPSN series of conferences started in Dortmund, Germany[1]. From that pioneering meeting, the event has been held biennially, in Brussels, Belgium [2], Jerusalem, Israel [3], Berlin, Germany [4], Amsterdam, The Netherlands [5], and Paris, France [6]. During the Paris conference, several bids to host PPSN 2002 were put forward; it was decided that the conference would be held in Granada with Juan J. Merelo Guerv´ os as General Chairman. The scientific content of the PPSN conference focuses on problem-solving paradigms gleaned from natural models, with an obvious emphasis on those that display an innate parallelism, such as evolutionary algorithms and ant-colony optimization algorithms. The majority of the papers, however, concentrate on evolutionary and hybrid algorithms, as is shown in the contents of this book and its predecessors. This edition of the conference proceedings has a large section on applications, be they classical problems or to real-world engineering problems, which shows how bioinspired algorithms are extending their use in the realms of business and enterprise.
