Nature does things in an amazing and way, which provides the inspirations to enrich the new concepts, methods and tools to perform the complex tasks. Human has been trying to understand the nature by exploring the underlying principles and mechanisms such as bird flocking, ant colonies, fish schooling, bacterial foraging, bee colonies, and animal herding. The field of nature-inspired optimization focuses on the physics- and biology-based optimization algorithms including Particle Swarm Optimization, Ant Colony Optimization, Bacterial Foraging Optimization, and Bee Colony Optimization, etc. The applications of those optimization algorithms are fairly vast such as job scheduling, data mining, design optimization, and pattern recognition. The special session aims to collect a series of leading and cutting-edge articles on ideas, concepts, and technologies that are inspired by nature. Applications of those nature-inspired optimization algorithms are all welcome.