When analyzing systems with a large number of parameters, the dimen sion of the original system may present insurmountable difficulties for the analysis. It may then be convenient to reformulate the original system in terms of substantially fewer aggregated variables, or macrovariables. In other words, an original system with an n-dimensional vector of states is reformulated as a system with a vector of dimension much less than n. The aggregated variables are either readily defined and processed, or the aggregated system may be considered as an approximate model for the orig inal system. In the latter case, the operation of the original system can be exhaustively analyzed within the framework of the aggregated model, and one faces the problems of defining the rules for introducing macrovariables, specifying loss of information and accuracy, recovering original variables from aggregates, etc. We consider also in detail the so-called iterative aggregation approach. It constructs an iterative process, at. every step of which a macroproblem is solved that is simpler than the original problem because of its lower dimension. Aggregation weights are then updated, and the procedure passes to the next step. Macrovariables are commonly used in coordinating problems of hierarchical optimization."

The revised and extended papers collected in this volume represent the cutting-edge of research at the nexus of electrical engineering and intelligent systems. They were selected from well over 1000 papers submitted to the high-profile international World Congress on Engineering held in London in July 2011. The chapters cover material across the full spectrum of work in the field, including computational intelligence, control engineering, network management, and wireless networks. Readers will also find substantive papers on signal processing, Internet computing, high performance computing, and industrial applications. The Electrical Engineering and Intelligent Systems conference, as part of the 2011 World Congress on Engineering was organized under the auspices of the non-profit International Association of Engineers (IAENG). With more than 30 nations represented on the conference committees alone, the Congress features the best and brightest scientific minds from a multitude of disciplines related to engineering. These peer-reviewed papers demonstrate the huge strides currently being taken in this rapidly developing field and reflect the excitement of those at the frontiers of this research.

Information Systems and Data Compression presents a uniform approach and methodology for designing intelligent information systems. A framework for information concepts is introduced for various types of information systems such as communication systems, information storage systems and systems for simplifying structured information. The book introduces several new concepts and presents a novel interpretation of a wide range of topics in communications, information storage, and information compression. Numerous illustrations for designing information systems for compression of digital data and images are used throughout the book.

Information Highways are widely considered as the next generation of high speed communication systems. These highways will be based on emerging Broadband Integrated Services Digital Networks (B-ISDN), which - at least in principle - are envisioned to support not only all the kinds of networking applications known today but also future applications which are not as yet understood fully or even anticipated. Thus, B-ISDNs release networking processes from the limitations which the communications medium has imposed historically. The operational generality stems from the versatility of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) which is the transfer mode adopted by ITU-T for broadband public ISDN as well as wide area private ISDN. A transfer mode which provides the transmission, multiplexing and switching core that lies at the foundations of a communication network. ATM is designed to integrate existing and future voice, audio, image and data services. Moreover, ATM aims to minimise the complexity of switching and buffer management, to optimise intermediate node processing and buffering and to bound transmission delays. These design objectives are met at high transmission speeds by keeping the basic unit of ATM transmission - the ATM cell - short and of fixed length.

Guarding Your Business outlines the organizational elements that must be in place to protect the information and physical assets of typical businesses and organizations. The book recognizes the need for an architecture integrated within the organizational environment for systematic protection. Such an architecture is offered along with the building blocks to make organizations resistant to human error and resilient under physical attack or natural disaster. The book addresses risk assessment, determination of quality-of-service levels that balance safety versus cost, security versus privacy, determination of access rights to data and software, and a security-conscious culture in the organization. Questions answered by experts from academia and industry include: How can one organize for security? What organizational structures, policies, and procedures must be in place? What legal and privacy issues must be addressed?

During a century, from the Van der Waals mean field description (1874) of gases to the introduction of renormalization group (RG techniques 1970), thermodynamics and statistical physics were just unable to account for the incredible universality which was observed in numerous critical phenomena. The great success of RG techniques is not only to solve perfectly this challenge of critical behaviour in thermal transitions but to introduce extremely useful tools in a wide field of daily situations where a system exhibits scale invariance. The introduction of scaling, scale invariance and universality concepts has been a significant turn in modern physics and more generally in natural sciences. Since then, a new "physics of scaling laws and critical exponents", rooted in scaling approaches, allows quantitative descriptions of numerous phenomena, ranging from phase transitions to earthquakes, polymer conformations, heartbeat rhythm, diffusion, interface growth and roughening, DNA sequence, dynamical systems, chaos and turbulence. The chapters are jointly written by an experimentalist and a theorist. This book aims at a pedagogical overview, offering to the students and researchers a thorough conceptual background and a simple account of a wide range of applications. It presents a complete tour of both the formal advances and experimental results associated with the notion of scaling, in physics, chemistry and biology.

Active networking is an exciting new paradigm in digital networking that has the potential to revolutionize the manner in which communication takes place. It is an emerging technology, one in which new ideas are constantly being formulated and new topics of research are springing up even as this book is being written. This technology is very likely to appeal to a broad spectrum of users from academia and industry. Therefore, this book was written in a way that enables all these groups to understand the impact of active networking in their sphere of interest. Information services managers, network administrators, and e-commerce developers would like to know the potential benefits of the new technology to their businesses, networks, and applications. The book introduces the basic active networking paradigm and its potential impacts on the future of information handling in general and on communications in particular. This is useful for forward-looking businesses that wish to actively participate in the development of active networks and ensure a head start in the integration of the technology in their future products, be they applications or networks. Areas in which active networking is likely to make significant impact are identified, and the reader is pointed to any related ongoing research efforts in the area. The book also provides a deeper insight into the active networking model for students and researchers, who seek challenging topics that define or extend frontiers of the technology. It describes basic components of the model, explains some of the terms used by the active networking community, and provides the reader with taxonomy of the research being conducted at the time this book was written. Current efforts are classified based on typical research areas such as mobility, security, and management. The intent is to introduce the serious reader to the background regarding some of the models adopted by the community, to outline outstanding issues concerning active networking, and to provide a snapshot of the fast-changing landscape in active networking research. Management is a very important issue in active networks because of its open nature. The latter half of the book explains the architectural concepts of a model for managing active networks and the motivation for a reference model that addresses limitations of the current network management framework by leveraging the powerful features of active networking to develop an integrated framework. It also describes a novel application enabled by active network technology called the Active Virtual Network Management Prediction (AVNMP) algorithm. AVNMP is a pro-active management system; in other words, it provides the ability to solve a potential problem before it impacts the system by modeling network devices within the network itself and running that model ahead of real time.

INRIA, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique

As suggested by the title of this book, I will present a collection of coherently related applications and a theoretical development of a general systems theory. Hopefully, this book will invite all readers to sample an exciting and challenging (even fun!) piece of interdisciplinary research, that has characterized the scientific and technological achievements of the twentieth century. And, I hope that many of them will be motivated to do additional reading and to contribute to topics along the lines described in the following pages. Since the applications in this volume range through many scientific disciplines, from sociology to atomic physics, from Einstein's relativity theory to Dirac's quan tum mechanics, from optimization theory to unreasonable effectiveness of mathe matics to foundations of mathematical modeling, from general systems theory to Schwartz's distributions, special care has been given to write each application in a language appropriate to that field. That is, mathematical symbols and abstractions are used at different levels so that readers in various fields will find it possible to read. Also, because of the wide range of applications, each chapter has been written so that, in general, there is no need to reference a different chapter in order to understand a specific application. At the same time, if a reader has the desire to go through the entire book without skipping any chapter, it is strongly suggested to refer back to Chapters 2 and 3 as often as possible.

A clear and succinct presentation of the essentials of this subject, together with some of its applications and a generous helping of interesting exercises. Following an introductory chapter with a taste of what is to come, the next three chapters constitute a course in nonsmooth analysis and identify a coherent and comprehensive approach to the subject, leading to an efficient, natural, and powerful body of theory. The whole is rounded off with a self-contained introduction to the theory of control of ordinary differential equations. The authors have incorporated a number of new results which clarify the relationships between the different schools of thought in the subject, with the aim of making nonsmooth analysis accessible to a wider audience. End-of-chapter problems offer scope for deeper understanding.

In volume I we developed the tools of "Multivalued Analysis. " In this volume we examine the applications. After all, the initial impetus for the development of the theory of set-valued functions came from its applications in areas such as control theory and mathematical economics. In fact, the needs of control theory, in particular the study of systems with a priori feedback, led to the systematic investigation of differential equations with a multi valued vector field (differential inclusions). For this reason, we start this volume with three chapters devoted to set-valued differential equations. However, in contrast to the existing books on the subject (i. e. J. -P. Aubin - A. Cellina: "Differential Inclusions," Springer-Verlag, 1983, and Deimling: "Multivalued Differential Equations," W. De Gruyter, 1992), here we focus on "Evolution Inclusions," which are evolution equations with multi valued terms. Evolution equations were raised to prominence with the development of the linear semigroup theory by Hille and Yosida initially, with subsequent im portant contributions by Kato, Phillips and Lions. This theory allowed a successful unified treatment of some apparently different classes of nonstationary linear par tial differential equations and linear functional equations. The needs of dealing with applied problems and the natural tendency to extend the linear theory to the nonlinear case led to the development of the nonlinear semigroup theory, which became a very effective tool in the analysis of broad classes of nonlinear evolution equations.

In this book I argue that a reason for the limited success of various studies under the general heading of cybernetics is failure to appreciate the importance of con- nuity, in a simple metrical sense of the term. It is with particular, but certainly not exclusive, reference to the Arti cial Intelligence (AI) effort that the shortcomings of established approaches are most easily seen. One reason for the relative failure of attempts to analyse and model intelligence is the customary assumption that the processing of continuous variables and the manipulation of discrete concepts should be considered separately, frequently with the assumption that continuous processing plays no part in thought. There is much evidence to the contrary incl- ing the observation that the remarkable ability of people and animals to learn from experience nds similar expression in tasks of both discrete and continuous nature and in tasks that require intimate mixing of the two. Such tasks include everyday voluntary movement while preserving balance and posture, with competitive games and athletics offering extreme examples. Continuous measures enter into many tasks that are usually presented as discrete. In tasks of pattern recognition, for example, there is often a continuous measure of the similarity of an imposed pattern to each of a set of paradigms, of which the most similar is selected. The importance of continuity is also indicated by the fact that adjectives and adverbs in everyday verbal communication have comparative and superlative forms.

The volume contains papers based on lectures delivered during the school "Per spectives in Control Theory" held in Sielpia, Poland on September 19-24, 1988. The aim of the school was to give the state-of-the-art presentation of recent achievements as weH as perspectives in such fields of control theory as optimal control and optimization, linear systems, and nonlinear systems. Accordingly, the volume includes survey papers together with presentations of some recent results. The special emphasis is put on: - nonlinear systems (algebraic and geometric methods), - optimal control and optimization (general problems, distributed parameter systems), - linear systems (linear-quadratic problem, robust stabilization). An important feature of the school (and consequently of the volume) was its really "international" character since it brought together leading control theoriests from West and East. All together the school was attended by 108 participants from 18 countries. During the school 21 one-hour invited lectures were delivered. Moreover, five half-an-hour talks were given and 30 contributions were presented in frames of poster sessions. The school was organized and supported by: Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Committee of Automatic Control and Robotics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, - Institute of Automatic Control, Warsaw University of Technology (as Co ordinator of the Basic Research Program R.P.I.02 "Theory of Control of Continuous Dynamic Systems and Discrete Processes" )."

This 2001 book presents a general theory as well as a constructive methodology to solve 'observation problems', that is, reconstructing the full information about a dynamical process on the basis of partial observed data. A general methodology to control processes on the basis of the observations is also developed. Illustrative but also practical applications in the chemical and petroleum industries are shown. This book is intended for use by scientists in the areas of automatic control, mathematics, chemical engineering and physics.

In the context of this book, adaptation is taken to mean a feature of a system aimed at achieving the best possible performance, when mathematical models of the environment and the system itself are not fully available. This has applications ranging from theories of visual perception and the processing of information, to the more technical problems of friction compensation and adaptive classification of signals in fixed-weight recurrent neural networks. Largely devoted to the problems of adaptive regulation, tracking and identification, this book presents a unifying system-theoretic view on the problem of adaptation in dynamical systems. Special attention is given to systems with nonlinearly parameterized models of uncertainty. Concepts, methods and algorithms given in the text can be successfully employed in wider areas of science and technology. The detailed examples and background information make this book suitable for a wide range of researchers and graduates in cybernetics, mathematical modelling and neuroscience.

Force and motion control systems of varying degrees of sophistication have shaped the lives of all individuals living in industrialized countries all over the world, and together with communication technology are largely responsible for the high standard ofliving prevalent in many communities. The brains of the vast majority of current control systems are electronic, in the shape of computers, microprocessors or programmable logic controllers (PLC), the nerves are provided by sensors, mainly electromech anical transducers, and the muscle comprises the drive system, in most cases either electric, pneumatic or hydraulic. The factors governing the choice of the most suitable drive are the nature of the application, the performance specification, size, weight, environ mental and safety constraints, with higher power levels favouring hydraulic drives. Past experience, especially in the machine tool sector, has clearly shown that, in the face of competition from electric drives, it is difficult to make a convincing case for hydraulic drives at the bottom end of the power range, specifically at fractional horsepower level. A further, and frequently overriding factor in the choice of drive is the familiarity of the system designer with a particular discipline, which can inhibit the selection of the optimum and most cost-effective solution for a given application. One of the objectives of this book is to help the electrical engineer overcome his natural reluctance to apply any other than electric drives."

A knowledge of linear systems provides a firm foundation for the study of optimal control theory and many areas of system theory and signal processing. State-space techniques developed since the early sixties have been proved to be very effective. The main objective of this book is to present a brief and somewhat complete investigation on the theory of linear systems, with emphasis on these techniques, in both continuous-time and discrete-time settings, and to demonstrate an application to the study of elementary (linear and nonlinear) optimal control theory. An essential feature of the state-space approach is that both time-varying and time-invariant systems are treated systematically. When time-varying systems are considered, another important subject that depends very much on the state-space formulation is perhaps real-time filtering, prediction, and smoothing via the Kalman filter. This subject is treated in our monograph entitled "Kalman Filtering with Real-Time Applications" published in this Springer Series in Information Sciences (Volume 17). For time-invariant systems, the recent frequency domain approaches using the techniques of Adamjan, Arov, and Krein (also known as AAK), balanced realization, and oo H theory via Nevanlinna-Pick interpolation seem very promising, and this will be studied in our forthcoming monograph entitled "Mathematical Ap proach to Signal Processing and System Theory." The present elementary treatise on linear system theory should provide enough engineering and mathe of these two subjects."

This volume consists of a selection of papers presented at the International Conference on Applied General Systems Research: Recent Developments and Trends which was held on the campus of the State University of New York at Binghamton in August 15-19, 1977, under the sponsorship of the Special Panel on Systems Science of the NATO Scientific Affairs Division. General systems research is a fairly new field which has been developing in the course of the last two or three decades. In my op~n10n, it can be best described as a movement which involves the study of all structural and context independent aspects of problem solving. As such, it is cross-disciplinary in nature and, in this sense, it might seem similar to mathematics. There is a consid erable difference, however, between the two. While pure mathe matics is basically oriented to the development of various axiomatic theories, regardless of whether or not they have any real world meaning, applied mathematics explores the applicability of some of these theories as potentially useful methodological tools in various problem areas. General systems research, in contrast with applied mathematics, is problem oriented rather than tool oriented. As such, it tries to develop genuine methods for solving systems problems, i. e. , structural type and context in dependent problems. The term "genuine method" is used here to refer to a method which adjusts to the problem rather than re quiring that the problem be adjusted to make the method applicable.

Analysis and Control of Boolean Networks presents a systematic new approach to the investigation of Boolean control networks. The fundamental tool in this approach is a novel matrix product called the semi-tensor product (STP). Using the STP, a logical function can be expressed as a conventional discrete-time linear system. In the light of this linear expression, certain major issues concerning Boolean network topology - fixed points, cycles, transient times and basins of attractors - can be easily revealed by a set of formulae. This framework renders the state-space approach to dynamic control systems applicable to Boolean control networks. The bilinear-systemic representation of a Boolean control network makes it possible to investigate basic control problems including controllability, observability, stabilization, disturbance decoupling etc.

DepCoS RELCOMEX is an annual series of conferences organized by Wroc aw University of Technology to promote a comprehensive approach to evaluation of system performability which is now commonly called "dependability." In contrast to classic analyses which were concentrated on reliability of technical resources and structures built from them, dependability is based on multi-disciplinary approach to theory, technology and maintenance of a system considered to be a multifaceted amalgamation of technical, information, organization, software and human (users, administrators, supervisors, etc.) resources. Diversity of processes being realized (data processing, system management, system monitoring, etc.), their concurrency and their reliance on in-system intelligence often severely impedes construction of strict mathematical models and calls for application of intelligent and soft computing methods.

This book presents the proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Dependability and Complex Systems DepCoS-RELCOMEX, which took place in Brunow Palace, Poland, from 30th June to 4th July, 2014. The articles selected for this volume illustrate the variety of topics that must be included in system dependability analysis: tools, methodologies and standards for modelling, design and simulation of the systems, security and confidentiality in information processing, specific issues of heterogeneous, today often wireless, computer networks or management of transportation networks."

The problem of viability of hybrid systems is considered in this work. A model for a hybrid system is developed including a means of including three forms of uncertainty: transition dynamics, structural uncertainty, and parametric uncertainty. A computational basis for viability of hybrid systems is developed and applied to three control law classes. An approach is developed for robust viability based on two extensions of the controllability operator. The three-tank example is examined for both the viability problem and robust viability problem.

The theory is applied through simulation to an active magnetic bearing system and to a batch polymerization process showing that viability can be satisfied in practice. The problem of viable attainability is examined based on the controllability operator approach introduced by Nerode and colleagues. Lastly, properties of the controllability operator are presented.

This book should be considered as an introduction to a special dass of hierarchical systems of optimal control, where subsystems are described by partial differential equations of various types. Optimization is carried out by means of a two-level scheme, where the center optimizes coordination for the upper level and subsystems find the optimal solutions for independent local problems. The main algorithm is a method of iterative aggregation. The coordinator solves the problern with macrovariables, whose number is less than the number of initial variables. This problern is often very simple. On the lower level, we have the usual optimal control problems of math ematical physics, which are far simpler than the initial statements. Thus, the decomposition (or reduction to problems ofless dimensions) is obtained. The algorithm constructs a sequence of so-called disaggregated solutions that are feasible for the main problern and converge to its optimal solutionunder certain assumptions ( e.g., under strict convexity of the input functions). Thus, we bridge the gap between two disciplines: optimization theory of large-scale systems and mathematical physics. The first motivation was a special model of branch planning, where the final product obeys a preset assortment relation. The ratio coefficient is maximized. Constraints are given in the form of linear inequalities with block diagonal structure of the part of a matrix that corresponds to subsystems. The central coordinator assem bles the final production from the components produced by the subsystems."

This book describes a new class of computing devices which are becoming omnipresent in every day life. They make information access and processing easily available for everyone from anywhere at any time. Mobility, wireless connectivity, di- versity, and ease-of-use are the magic keywords of Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing. The book covers these front-end devices as well as their operating systems and the back-end infrastructure which integrate these pervasive components into a seamless IT world. A strong emphasis is placed on the underlying technologies and standards applied when building up pervasive solutions. These fundamental topics include commonly used terms such as XML, WAP, UMTS, GPRS, Bluetooth, Jini, transcoding, and cryptography, to mention just a few. Voice, Web Application Servers, Portals, Web Services, and Synchronized and Device Management are new in the second edition.
Besides a comprehensive state-of-the-art description of the Pervasive Computing technology itself, this book gives an overview of today's real-life applications and accompanying service offerings. M-Commerce, e-Business, networked home, travel, and finance are exciting examples of applied Ubiquitous Computing.

This special volume is dedicated to Boris M. Mordukhovich, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, and aims to celebrate his fundamental contributionsto variational analysis, generalizeddifferentiationand their applications.A main exampleof these contributions is Boris' recent opus magnus "Variational Analysis and Generalized Differentiation"(vols. I and II) [2,3]. A detailed explanationand careful description of Boris' research and achievements can be found in [1]. Boris' active work and jovial attitude have constantly inspired researchers of several generations, with whom he has generously shared his knowledgeand ent- siasm, along with his well-known warmth and human touch. Variationalanalysis is a rapidlygrowing?eld within pure and applied mathem- ics, with numerous applications to optimization, control theory, economics, en- neering, and other disciplines. Each of the 12 chapters of this volume is a carefully reviewed paper in the ?eld of variational analysis and related topics. Many chapters of this volume were presented at the International Symposium on Variational Analysis and Optimization (ISVAO), held in the Department of Applied Mathematics, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, from November 28 to November 30, 2008. The symposium was organized in honour of Boris' 60thbirthday.It broughttogetherBorisandotherresearchersto discusssta- of-the-art results in variational analysis and its applications, with emphasis on op- mization and control. We thank the organizers and participants of the symposium, who made the symposium a highly bene?cial and enjoyable event. We are also grateful to all the authors of this special volume, who have taken the opportunityto celebrate Boris' birthdayand his decadesof contributionsto the area.

This book is an introduction to the mathematical theory of design for articulated mechanical systems known as linkages. The focus is on sizing mechanical constraints that guide the movement of a work piece, or end-effector, of the system. The function of the device is prescribed as a set of positions to be reachable by the end-effector; and the mechanical constraints are formed by joints that limit relative movement. The goal is to find all the devices that can achieve a specific task. Formulated in this way the design problem is purely geometric in character. Robot manipulators, walking machines, and mechanical hands are examples of articulated mechanical systems that rely on simple mechanical constraints to provide a complex workspace for the end- effector. The principles presented in this book form the foundation for a design theory for these devices. The emphasis, however, is on articulated systems with fewer degrees of freedom than that of the typical robotic system, and therefore, less complexity. This book will be useful to mathematics, engineering and computer science departments teaching courses on mathematical modeling of robotics and other articulated mechanical systems. This new edition includes research results of the past decade on the synthesis of multi loop planar and spherical linkages, and the use of homotopy methods and Clifford algebras in the synthesis of spatial serial chains. One new chapter on the synthesis of spatial serial chains introduces numerical homotopy and the linear product decomposition of polynomial systems. The second new chapter introduces the Clifford algebra formulation of the kinematics equations of serial chain robots. Examples are use throughout to demonstrate the theory.