Differential evolution is arguably one of the hottest topics in today's computational intelligence research. This book seeks to present a comprehensive study of the state of the art in this technology and also directions for future research. The fourteen chapters of this book have been written by leading experts in the area. The first seven chapters focus on algorithm design, while the last seven describe real-world applications. Chapter 1 introduces the basic differential evolution (DE) algorithm and presents a broad overview of the field. Chapter 2 presents a new, rotationally invariant DE algorithm. The role of self-adaptive control parameters in DE is investigated in Chapter 3. Chapters 4 and 5 address constrained optimization; the former develops suitable stopping conditions for the DE run, and the latter presents an improved DE algorithm for problems with very small feasible regions. A novel DE algorithm, based on the concept of "opposite" points, is the topic of Chapter 6. Chapter 7 provides a survey of multi-objective differential evolution algorithms. A review of the major application areas of differential evolution is presented in Chapter 8. Chapter 9 discusses the application of differential evolution in two important areas of applied electromagnetics. Chapters 10 and 11 focus on applications of hybrid DE algorithms to problems in power system optimization. Chapter 12 applies the DE algorithm to computer chess. The use of DE to solve a problem in bioprocess engineering is discussed in Chapter 13. Chapter 14 describes the application of hybrid differential evolution to a problem in control engineering.