This book is devoted to an investigation of control problems which can be described by ordinary differential equations and be expressed in terms of game theoretical notions. In these terms, a strategy is a control based on the feedback principle which will assure a definite equality for the controlled process which is subject to uncertain factors such as a move or a controlling action of the opponent. "Game" "Theoretical Control Problems" contains definitions and formalizations of differential games, existence for equilibrium and extensive discussions of optimal strategies. Formal definitions and statements are accompanied by suitable motivations and discussions of computational algorithms. The book is addessed to mathematicians, engineers, economists and other users of control theoretical and game theoretical notions.

Proceedings of the IUTAM Symposium on Structural Optimization, Melbourne, Australia, February 9-13, 1988

Over the past several years, cooperative control and optimization has un questionably been established as one of the most important areas of research in the military sciences. Even so, cooperative control and optimization tran scends the military in its scope -having become quite relevant to a broad class of systems with many exciting, commercial, applications. One reason for all the excitement is that research has been so incredibly diverse -spanning many scientific and engineering disciplines. This latest volume in the Cooperative Systems book series clearly illustrates this trend towards diversity and creative thought. And no wonder, cooperative systems are among the hardest systems control science has endeavored to study, hence creative approaches to model ing, analysis, and synthesis are a must The definition of cooperation itself is a slippery issue. As you will see in this and previous volumes, cooperation has been cast into many different roles and therefore has assumed many diverse meanings. Perhaps the most we can say which unites these disparate concepts is that cooperation (1) requires more than one entity, (2) the entities must have some dynamic behavior that influences the decision space, (3) the entities share at least one common objective, and (4) entities are able to share information about themselves and their environment. Optimization and control have long been active fields of research in engi neering."

This book has grown out of lectures and courses in calculus of variations and optimization taught for many years at the University of Michigan to graduate students at various stages of their careers, and always to a mixed audience of students in mathematics and engineering. It attempts to present a balanced view of the subject, giving some emphasis to its connections with the classical theory and to a number of those problems of economics and engineering which have motivated so many of the present developments, as well as presenting aspects of the current theory, particularly value theory and existence theorems. However, the presentation ofthe theory is connected to and accompanied by many concrete problems of optimization, classical and modern, some more technical and some less so, some discussed in detail and some only sketched or proposed as exercises. No single part of the subject (such as the existence theorems, or the more traditional approach based on necessary conditions and on sufficient conditions, or the more recent one based on value function theory) can give a sufficient representation of the whole subject. This holds particularly for the existence theorems, some of which have been conceived to apply to certain large classes of problems of optimization. For all these reasons it is essential to present many examples (Chapters 3 and 6) before the existence theorems (Chapters 9 and 11-16), and to investigate these examples by means of the usual necessary conditions, sufficient conditions, and value function theory.

The articles in this volume cover recent work in the area of flow control from the point of view of both engineers and mathematicians. These writings are especially timely, as they coincide with the emergence of the role of mathematics and systematic engineering analysis in flow control and optimization. Recently this role has significantly expanded to the point where now sophisticated mathematical and computational tools are being increasingly applied to the control and optimization of fluid flows. These articles document some important work that has gone on to influence the practical, everyday design of flows; moreover, they represent the state of the art in the formulation, analysis, and computation of flow control problems. This volume will be of interest to both applied mathematicians and to engineers.

This monograph is an introduction to optimal control theory for systems governed by vector ordinary differential equations. It is not intended as a state-of-the-art handbook for researchers. We have tried to keep two types of reader in mind: (1) mathematicians, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in mathematics who want a concise introduction to a field which contains nontrivial interesting applications of mathematics (for example, weak convergence, convexity, and the theory of ordinary differential equations); (2) economists, applied scientists, and engineers who want to understand some of the mathematical foundations. of optimal control theory. In general, we have emphasized motivation and explanation, avoiding the "definition-axiom-theorem-proof" approach. We make use of a large number of examples, especially one simple canonical example which we carry through the entire book. In proving theorems, we often just prove the simplest case, then state the more general results which can be proved. Many of the more difficult topics are discussed in the "Notes" sections at the end of chapters and several major proofs are in the Appendices. We feel that a solid understanding of basic facts is best attained by at first avoiding excessive generality. We have not tried to give an exhaustive list of references, preferring to refer the reader to existing books or papers with extensive bibliographies. References are given by author's name and the year of publication, e.g., Waltman [1974].

'Et moi ... si j'avait su comment en revenir. One service mathematics has rendered thl je n'y serais point aile: human race. It has put common sense back where it belongs. on the topmost shelf nexl Jules Verne to the dusty canister labelled 'discarded non. The series is divergent; therefore we may be sense'. Eric T. Bell able to do something with it O. Heaviside Mathematics is a tool for thought. A highly necessary tool in a world where both feedback and non. Iinearities abound. Similarly, all kinds of parts of mathematics serve as tools for other parts and fO other sciences. Applying a simple rewriting rule to the quote on the right above one finds such statements as: 'One service topology has rendered mathematical physics .. .'; 'One service logic has rendered com. puter science ... .'; 'One service category theory has rendered mathematics .. .'. All arguably true. And all statements obtainable this way form part of the raison d'etre of this series."

In recent years many researchers in material science have focused their attention on the study of composite materials, equilibrium of crystals and crack distribution in continua subject to loads. At the same time several new issues in computer vision and image processing have been studied in depth. The understanding of many of these problems has made significant progress thanks to new methods developed in calculus of variations, geometric measure theory and partial differential equations. In particular, new technical tools have been introduced and successfully applied. For example, in order to describe the geometrical complexity of unknown patterns, a new class of problems in calculus of variations has been introduced together with a suitable functional setting: the free-discontinuity problems and the special BV and BH functions. The conference held at Villa Olmo on Lake Como in September 1994 spawned successful discussion of these topics among mathematicians, experts in computer science and material scientists.

'Optimization Day' (OD) has been a series of annual mini-conferences in Aus tralia since 1994. The purpose of this series of events is to gather researchers in optimization and its related areas from Australia and their collaborators, in order to exchange new developments of optimization theories, methods and their applications. The first four OD mini-conferences were held in The Uni versity of Ballarat (1994), The University of New South Wales (1995), The University of Melbourne (1996) and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (1997), respectively. They were all on the eastern coast of Australia. The fifth mini-conference Optimization Days was held at the Centre for Ap plied Dynamics and Optimization (CADO), Department of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Western Australia, Perth, from 29 to 30 June 1998. This is the first time the OD mini-conference has been held at the west ern coast of Australia. This fifth OD preceded the International Conference on Optimization: Techniques and Applications (ICOTA) held at Curtin Uni versity of Technology. Many participants attended both events. There were 28 participants in this year's mini-conference and 22 presentations in the mini conference. The presentations in this volume are refereed contributions based on papers presented at the fifth Optimization Days mini-conference. The volume is di vided into the following parts: Global Optimization, Nonsmooth Optimization, Optimization Methods and Applications."

In the fifties and sixties, several real problems, old and new, especially in Physics, Mechanics, Fluidodynamics, Structural Engi- neering, have shown the need of new mathematical models for study- ing the equilibrium of a system. This has led to the formulation of Variational Inequalities (by G. Stampacchia), and to the develop- ment of Complementarity Systems (by W.S. Dorn, G.B. Dantzig, R.W. Cottle, O.L. Mangasarian et al.) with important applications in the elasto-plastic field (initiated by G. Maier). The great advan- tage of these models is that the equilibrium is not necessarily the extremum of functional, like energy, so that no such functional must be supposed to exist. In the same decades, in some fields like Control Theory, Net- works, Industrial Systems, Logistics, Management Science, there has been a strong request of mathmatical models for optimizing situa- tions where there are concurrent objectives, so that Vector Optimiza- tion (initiated by W. Pareto) has received new impetus. With regard to equilibrium problems, Vector Optimization has the above - mentioned drawback of being obliged to assume the exis- tence of a (vector) functional. Therefore, at the end of the seventies the study of Vector Variational Inequalities began with the scope of exploiting the advantages of both variational and vector models. This volume puts together most of the recent mathematical results in Vector Variational Inequalities with the purpose of contributing to further research.

Operations Research: 1934-1941," 35, 1, 143-152; "British The goal of the Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Operational Research in World War II," 35, 3, 453-470; Management Science is to provide to decision makers and "U. S. Operations Research in World War II," 35, 6, 910-925; problem solvers in business, industry, government and and the 1984 article by Harold Lardner that appeared in academia a comprehensive overview of the wide range of Operations Research: "The Origin of Operational Research," ideas, methodologies, and synergistic forces that combine to 32, 2, 465-475. form the preeminent decision-aiding fields of operations re search and management science (OR/MS). To this end, we The Encyclopedia contains no entries that define the fields enlisted a distinguished international group of academics of operations research and management science. OR and MS and practitioners to contribute articles on subjects for are often equated to one another. If one defines them by the which they are renowned. methodologies they employ, the equation would probably The editors, working with the Encyclopedia's Editorial stand inspection. If one defines them by their historical Advisory Board, surveyed and divided OR/MS into specific developments and the classes of problems they encompass, topics that collectively encompass the foundations, applica the equation becomes fuzzy. The formalism OR grew out of tions, and emerging elements of this ever-changing field. We the operational problems of the British and U. s. military also wanted to establish the close associations that OR/MS efforts in World War II."

This book contains translations of papers from the first volume of the new Russian-language journal published at the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics (Sibe- rian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk) since 1994. In 1994 the journal was titled Sibirskil Zhurnal Issledovaniya Operatsil. Since 1995 this journal has the title DiskretnYl Analiz i Issledovanie Operatsil (Discrete Analysis and Operations Research) The aim of this journal is to bring together research papers in different areas of discrete mathematics and computer science. The journal DiskretnYl Analiz i Issledovanie Operatsil covers the following fields: * discrete optimization * synthesis and complexity * discrete structures and * of control systems extremal problems * automata * combinatorics * graphs * control and reliability * game theory and its of discrete devices applications * mathematical models and * coding theory methods of decision making * scheduling theory * design and analysis * functional systems theory of algori thms Contributions presented to the journal can be original research papers and occasional survey articles of moderate length. A. D. Korshunov THE NUMBER OF DISTINCT SUBWORDS OF FIXED LENGTH IN THE MORSE-HEDLUND SEQUENCEt) S. V. Avgustinovich An exact formula is obtained for the number of distinct subwords of length n in the Morse-Hedlund sequence [1), i. e. , the sequence in which the initial member is 0 and subsequent members are produced by unlimited application of the operation of substituting 01 for 0 and 10 for 1.

This book is devoted to a new direction in linear algebra and operator theory that deals with the invariants of partially specified matrices and operators, and with the spectral analysis of their completions. The theory developed centers around two major problems concerning matrices of which part of the entries are given and the others are unspecified. The first is a classification problem and aims at a simplification of the given part with the help of admissible similarities. The results here may be seen as a far reaching generalization of the Jordan canonical form. The second problem is called the eigenvalue completion problem and asks to describe all possible eigenvalues and their multiplicities of the matrices which one obtains by filling in the unspecified entries. Both problems are also considered in an infinite dimensional operator framework. A large part of the book deals with applications to matrix theory and analysis, namely to stabilization problems in mathematical system theory, to problems of Wiener-Hopf factorization and interpolation for matrix polynomials and rational matrix functions, to the Kronecker structure theory of linear pencils, and to non everywhere defined operators. The eigenvalue completion problem has a natural associated inverse, which appears as a restriction problem. The analysis of these two problems is often simpler when a solution of the corresponding classification problem is available."

The IUTAM Symposium on Advances in Nonlinear Stochastic Mechanics, held in Trondheim July 3-7, 1995, was the eighth of a series of IUTAM sponsored symposia which focus on the application of stochastic methods in mechanics. The previous meetings took place in Coventry, UK (1972), Sout'hampton, UK (1976), FrankfurtjOder, Germany (1982), Stockholm, Sweden (1984), Innsbruckjlgls, Austria (1987), Turin, Italy (1991) and San Antonio, Texas (1993). The symposium provided an extraordinary opportunity for scholars to meet and discuss recent advances in stochastic mechanics. The participants represented a wide range of expertise, from pure theoreticians to people primarily oriented toward applications. A significant achievement of the symposium was the very extensive discussions taking place over the whole range from highly theoretical questions to practical engineering applications. Several presentations also clearly demonstrated the substantial progress that has been achieved in recent years in terms of developing and implement ing stochastic analysis techniques for mechanical engineering systems. This aspect was further underpinned by specially invited extended lectures on computational stochastic mechanics, engineering applications of stochastic mechanics, and nonlinear active control. The symposium also reflected the very active and high-quality research taking place in the field of stochastic stability. Ten presentations were given on this topic ofa total of47 papers. A main conclusion that can be drawn from the proceedings of this symposium is that stochastic mechanics as a subject has reached great depth and width in both methodology and applicability.

This volume collects the notes of the CIME course "Nonlinear PDE s and applications" held in Cetraro (Italy) on June 23 28, 2008. It consists of four series of lectures, delivered by Stefano Bianchini (SISSA, Trieste), Eric A. Carlen (Rutgers University), Alexander Mielke (WIAS, Berlin), and Cedric Villani (Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon). They presented a broad overview of far-reaching findings and exciting new developments concerning, in particular, optimal transport theory, nonlinear evolution equations, functional inequalities, and differential geometry. A sampling of the main topics considered here includes optimal transport, Hamilton-Jacobi equations, Riemannian geometry, and their links with sharp geometric/functional inequalities, variational methods for studying nonlinear evolution equations and their scaling properties, and the metric/energetic theory of gradient flows and of rate-independent evolution problems. The book explores the fundamental connections between all of these topics and points to new research directions in contributions by leading experts in these fields.

Advances on Fractional Inequalities use primarily the Caputo fractional derivative, as the most important in applications, and presents the first fractional differentiation inequalities of Opial type which involves the balanced fractional derivatives. The book continues with right and mixed fractional differentiation Ostrowski inequalities in the univariate and multivariate cases. Next the right and left, as well as mixed, Landau fractional differentiation inequalities in the univariate and multivariate cases are illustrated. Throughout the book many applications are given.

Fractional differentiation inequalities are by themselves an important and great mathematical topic for research. Furthermore they have many applications, the most important ones are in establishing uniqueness of solution in fractional differential equations and systems and in fractional partial differential equations. Also they provide upper bounds to the solutions of the above equations.

Fractional Calculus has emerged as very useful over the last forty years due to its many applications in almost all applied sciences. This is currently seen in applications in acoustic wave propagation in inhomogeneous porous material, diffusive transport, fluid flow, dynamical processes in self-similar structures, dynamics of earthquakes, optics, geology, viscoelastic materials, bio-sciences, bioengineering, medicine, economics, probability and statistics, astrophysics, chemical engineering, physics, splines, tomography, fluid mechanics, electromagnetic waves, nonlinear control, signal processing, control of power electronic, converters, chaotic dynamics, polymer science, proteins, polymer physics, electrochemistry, statistical physics, rheology, thermodynamics, neural networks, etc. Almost all fields of research in science and engineering use fractional calculus in order to describe results.

This book is a part of Fractional Calculus, therefore it is useful for researchers and graduate students for research, seminars and advanced graduate courses, in pure and applied mathematics, engineering and all other applied sciences."

Semiring theory stands with a foot in each of two mathematical domains. The first being abstract algebra and the other the fields of applied mathematics such as optimization theory, the theory of discrete-event dynamical systems, automata theory, and formal language theory, as well as from the allied areas of theoretical computer science and theoretical physics. Most important applications of semiring theory in these areas turn out to revolve around the problem of finding the equalizer of a pair of affine maps between two semimodules. In this volume, we chart the state of the art on solving this problem, and present many specific cases of applications.

This book is essentially the third part of a trilogy, along with Semirings and their Applications, and Power Algebras over Semirings, both written by the same author and published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999. While each book can be read independently of the others, to get the full force of the theory and applications one should have access to all three.

This work will be of interest to academic and industrial researchers and graduate students. The intent of the book is to bring the applications to the attention of the abstract mathematicians and to make the abstract mathematics available to those who are using these tools in an ad-hoc manner without realizing the full force of the theory.

Convex Analysis may be considered as a refinement of standard calculus, with equalities and approximations replaced by inequalities. As such, it can easily be integrated into a graduate study curriculum. Minimization algorithms, more specifically those adapted to non-differentiable functions, provide an immediate application of convex analysis to various fields related to optimization and operations research. These two topics making up the title of the book, reflect the two origins of the authors, who belong respectively to the academic world and to that of applications. Part I can be used as an introductory textbook (as a basis for courses, or for self-study); Part II continues this at a higher technical level and is addressed more to specialists, collecting results that so far have not appeared in books.

New isoperimetric inequalities and random process techniques have recently appeared at the basis of the modern understanding of Probability in Banach spaces. Based on these tools, the book presents a complete treatment of the main aspects of Probability in Banach spaces (e.g. boundedness and continuity of random processes, integrability and limit theorems for vector valued random variables) and of some of their links to Geometry of Banach spaces. Its purpose is to present some of the main aspects of this theory, from the foundations to the latest developments, treated with the most recent and updated tools. In particular, the most important features are the systematic use of isoperimetry and related concentration of measure phenomena (to study integrability and limit theorems for vector valued random variables), and recent abstract random process techniques (entropy and majorizing measures). Some examples of these probabilistic ideas to classical Banach space theory complete this exposition.

The point of departure in the present book is that the decision makers, involved in the evaluation of alternatives under conflicting criteria, express their preferential judgement by estimating ratios of subjective values or differences of the corresponding logarithms, the so-called grades. Three MCDA methods are studied in detail: the Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique SMART, as well as the Additive and the Multiplicative AHP, both pairwise-comparison methods which do not suffer from the well-known shortcomings of the original Analytic Hierarchy Process. Context-related preference modelling on the basis of psycho-physical research in visual perception and motor skills is extensively discussed in the introductory chapters. Thereafter many extensions of the ideas are presented via case studies in university administration, health care, environmental assessment, budget allocation, and energy planning at the national and the European level. The issues under consideration are: group decision making with inhomogeneous power distributions, the search for a compromise solution, resource allocation and fair distributions, scenario analysis in long-term planning, conflict analysis via the pairwise comparison of concessions, and multi-objective optimization. The final chapters are devoted to the fortunes of MCDA in the hands of its designers. The research started in the late seventies, when I got involved in three different problems: the nomination procedures in a university, the evaluation of alternative energy-research proposals, and the evaluation of non-linear programming software.

The aim of this book is to present the mathematical theory and the know-how to make computer programs for the numerical approximation of Optimal Control of PDE's. The computer programs are presented in a straightforward generic language. As a consequence they are well structured, clearly explained and can be translated easily into any high level programming language. Applications and corresponding numerical tests are also given and discussed. To our knowledge, this is the first book to put together mathematics and computer programs for Optimal Control in order to bridge the gap between mathematical abstract algorithms and concrete numerical ones.
The text is addressed to students and graduates in Mathematics, Mechanics, Applied Mathematics, Numerical Software, Information Technology and Engineering. It can also be used for Master and Ph.D. programs.

This book combines the efforts of a distinguished team of authors, who are all renowned mathematicians and expositors, and provides a modern introduction to the calculus of variations. By focusing on the one-dimensional case it remains relatively free of technicalities, and therefore provides a useful overview of the theory at a level suitable for graduate students.

Semilinear elliptic equations are of fundamental importance for the study of geometry, physics, mechanics, engineering and life sciences. The variational approach to these equations has experienced spectacular success in recent years, reaching a high level of complexity and refinement, with a multitude of applications. Additionally, some of the simplest variational methods are evolving as classical tools in the field of nonlinear differential equations. This book is an introduction to variational methods and their applications to semilinear elliptic problems. Providing a comprehensive overview on the subject, this book will support both student and teacher engaged in a first course in nonlinear elliptic equations. The material is introduced gradually, and in some cases redundancy is added to stress the fundamental steps in theory-building. Topics include differential calculus for functionals, linear theory, and existence theorems by minimization techniques and min-max procedures. Requiring a basic knowledge of Analysis, Functional Analysis and the most common function spaces, such as Lebesgue and Sobolev spaces, this book will be of primary use to graduate students based in the field of nonlinear partial differential equations. It will also serve as valuable reading for final year undergraduates seeking to learn about basic working tools from variational methods and the management of certain types of nonlinear problems.

In its thousands of years of history, mathematics has made an extraordinary ca reer. It started from rules for bookkeeping and computation of areas to become the language of science. Its potential for decision support was fully recognized in the twentieth century only, vitally aided by the evolution of computing and communi cation technology. Mathematical optimization, in particular, has developed into a powerful machinery to help planners. Whether costs are to be reduced, profits to be maximized, or scarce resources to be used wisely, optimization methods are available to guide decision making. Opti mization is particularly strong if precise models of real phenomena and data of high quality are at hand - often yielding reliable automated control and decision proce dures. But what, if the models are soft and not all data are around? Can mathematics help as well? This book addresses such issues, e. g., problems of the following type: - An elevator cannot know all transportation requests in advance. In which order should it serve the passengers? - Wing profiles of aircrafts influence the fuel consumption. Is it possible to con tinuously adapt the shape of a wing during the flight under rapidly changing conditions? - Robots are designed to accomplish specific tasks as efficiently as possible. But what if a robot navigates in an unknown environment? - Energy demand changes quickly and is not easily predictable over time. Some types of power plants can only react slowly."

Written from an engineering point of view, this book covers the most common and important approaches for the identification of nonlinear static and dynamic systems. The book also provides the reader with the necessary background on optimization techniques, making it fully self-contained. The new edition includes exercises.