Since its inception in 1998, ANTS has been a highly selective, single-track meeting that provided a forum for discussing advances in the field of swarm intelligence. It solicits submissions presenting significant, original research from researchers and practitioners of any area related to swarm intelligence.
Swarm intelligence is an interdisciplinary and rapidly evolving field, rooted in the study of self-organizing processes in both natural and artificial systems. Researchers from disciplines ranging from ethology to statistical physics have developed models that explain collective phenomena, such as decision-making in social insect colonies and collective movements in human crowds. Swarm-inspired algorithms and methods have proven effective in solving complex optimization problems and creating multi-robot and networked systems of unparalleled resilience, adaptability and scalability. Applications of swarm intelligence continue to grow and become increasingly critical for addressing societal challenges such as environmental sustainability, food security, health, and global conflicts.
The 2026 edition’s theme is "reaching beyond - swarm intelligence across systems, disciplines, and communities". The meeting seeks to encourage new perspectives, help bridge traditional boundaries and enable open debate on what could be ambitious, exploratory, and groundbreaking endeavors to embark on.
Call for Papers
The Proceedings are published by Springer-Nature in their Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS series.
The journal Swarm Intelligence will publish a special issue dedicated to ANTS 2026 that will contain extended versions of selected research works presented at the conference.
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Registration will open in January 2026.
Continuing with a tradition started at
Submissions may be a maximum of 11 pages, excluding references, when typeset in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) LaTeX template. Submissions should be a minimum of 7 full pages.
This strict page limit includes figures, tables, and all supplementary sections (e.g., Acknowledgements). The only exclusion from the page limit is the reference list, which should be of any length suitable to adequately position the paper with respect to the state of the art.
Papers should be prepared in English, in the Springer LNCS LaTeX style, using the default font and font size. Authors should consult Springer’s authors’ guidelines and use their proceedings template for LaTeX, for the preparation of their papers. Please download the Proceedings (LNCS) LaTex template package (zip, 318 kB) and authors' guidelines (pdf, 244 kB) directly from the Springer website.
Submissions that do not respect these guidelines will not be considered.
Note: Authors may find it convenient that Springer LNCS LaTex templates are available in Overleaf.
The initial submission must be in PDF format.
All submissions must comply with Springer Nature’s Book Authors’ Code of Conduct.
Please note that in the camera-ready phase, authors of accepted papers will need to submit both a compiled PDF and all source files (including LaTeX files and figures).
The camera-ready phase will have more detailed formatting requirements than the initial submission phase.
Springer offers authors the option of including videos in their proceedings papers. You may (optionally) upload a supplementary video file (only MP4 format, maximum duration of 180 seconds, maximum file size of 50 MB, resolution 16:9). Please note that a video that was NOT submitted with the initial submission of an ANTS paper, will NOT be accepted at a later date. Authors must not violate privacy and confidentiality rules and, as always, permission must be sought for use of third-party content.
The paper submission system is now open and closes at 23:59:59 (AoE) on 10 November 2025.
Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed on the basis of technical quality, relevance, significance, and clarity. If a submission is not accepted as a full length paper, it may still be accepted either as a short paper or as an extended abstract. In such cases, authors will be asked to reduce the length of the submission accordingly. Authors of all accepted papers will be asked to execute revisions, based on the reviewers’ comments.
The Proceedings are published by Springer-Nature in their Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.
The journal Swarm Intelligence will publish a special issue dedicated to ANTS 2026 that will contain extended versions of selected research works presented at the conference.
