Abstract: Invasive Weed Optimization(IWO) is a recently proposed simple and effective population-based novel numerical optimization algorithm. It's receiving increasing focuses from academic and engineering optimization fields. IWO is inspired from the invasive and colonizing characteristics of weeds, which tries to imitate the robustness, adaptation and randomness embodied by weeds during the colonizing process. Here,the fundamental principles and framework of IWO were described in detail. Then, the advances of IWO in the current optimization and engineering fields were summed up.

Key words: Invasive weed optimization, Engineering optimization, Colonization, Robustness