This book offers an excellent presentation of intelligent engineering and informatics foundations for researchers in this field as well as many examples with industrial application. It contains extended versions of selected papers presented at the inaugural ACASE 2012 Conference dedicated to the Applications of Systems Engineering. This conference was held from the 6th to the 8th of February 2012, at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, organized by the University of Technology, Sydney (Australia), Wroclaw University of Technology (Poland) and the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg (Austria). The book is organized into three main parts. Part I contains papers devoted to the heuristic approaches that