The topic of this book is a range of various and at first glance quite heterogeneous techniques for modeling complex problems—the area of the so-called nature-analogous methodsmethods, nature-analogous, which we here refer to more precisely as methods of Artificial Intelligence (AIArtificial Intelligence (AI)) and Artificial Life (ALArtificial Life (AL)). The individual techniques, which are presented in the various chapters and illustrated with application examples, are in principle quite well known, and for each individual technique, there are of course also specialized textbooks. Cellular automata, for example, were developed in the 1950s by John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam; evolutionary algorithms, to name another example, have been known since the early 1970s and have repeatedly demonstrated their versatile applicability in very different scientific and practical fields. Only in recent times, however, has there been a beginning to understand the various individual techniques as a coherent field, whose application possibilities in science and practice are far from being exhausted and in some cases are still in their infancy. This was also the reason for us to write this textbook.