The 22 revised full papers, 19 revised short papers, and 9 poster abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 papers submitted.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence, ANTS 2004, held in Brussels, Belgium in September 2004. The 22 revised full papers, 19 revised short papers, and 9 poster abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 papers submitted. The papers are devoted to theoretical and foundational aspects of ant algorithms, ant colony optimization and swarm intelligence and deal with a broad variety of optimization applications in networking and operations research.