This volume contains the proceedings of the XII Symposium of Probability and Stochastic Processes which took place at Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan in Merida, Mexico, on November 16-20, 2015. This meeting was the twelfth meeting in a series of ongoing biannual meetings aimed at showcasing the research of Mexican probabilists as well as promote new collaborations between the participants. The book features articles drawn from different research areas in probability and stochastic processes, such as: risk theory, limit theorems, stochastic partial differential equations, random trees, stochastic differential games, stochastic control, and coalescence. Two of the main manuscripts survey recent developments on stochastic control and scaling limits of Markov-branching trees, written by Kazutoshi Yamasaki and Benedicte Haas, respectively. The research-oriented manuscripts provide new advances in active research fields in Mexico. The wide selection of topics makes the book accessible to advanced graduate students and researchers in probability and stochastic processes.

Understanding the latest capabilities in the cyber threat landscape as well as the cyber forensic challenges and approaches is the best way users and organizations can prepare for potential negative events. Adopting an experiential learning approach, this book describes how cyber forensics researchers, educators and practitioners can keep pace with technological advances, and acquire the essential knowledge and skills, ranging from IoT forensics, malware analysis, and CCTV and cloud forensics to network forensics and financial investigations. Given the growing importance of incident response and cyber forensics in our digitalized society, this book will be of interest and relevance to researchers, educators and practitioners in the field, as well as students wanting to learn about cyber forensics.

This book reports on an outstanding research devoted to modeling and control of dynamic systems using fractional-order calculus. It describes the development of model-based control design methods for systems described by fractional dynamic models. More than 300 years had passed since Newton and Leibniz developed a set of mathematical tools we now know as calculus. Ever since then the idea of non-integer derivatives and integrals, universally referred to as fractional calculus, has been of interest to many researchers. However, due to various issues, the usage of fractional-order models in real-life applications was limited. Advances in modern computer science made it possible to apply efficient numerical methods to the computation of fractional derivatives and integrals. This book describes novel methods developed by the author for fractional modeling and control, together with their successful application in real-world process control scenarios.

This monograph investigates the stability and performance of control systems subject to actuator saturation. It presents new results obtained by both improving the treatment of the saturation function and constructing new Lyapunov functions. In particular, two improved treatments of the saturation function are described that exploit the intricate structural properties of its traditional convex hull representation. The authors apply these treatments to the estimation of the domain of attraction and the finite-gain L2 performance by using the quadratic Lyapunov function and the composite quadratic Lyapunov function. Additionally, an algebraic computation method is given for the exact determination of the maximal contractively invariant ellipsoid, a level set of a quadratic Lyapunov function. The authors conclude with a look at some of the problems that can be solved by the methods developed and described throughout the book. Numerous step-by-step descriptions, examples, and simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of their results. Stability and Performance of Control Systems with Actuator Saturation will be an invaluable reference for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in control engineering and applied mathematics.

Agent-based modeling and social simulation have emerged as an interdisciplinary area of social science that includes computational economics, organizational science, social dynamics, and complex systems. This area contributes to enriching our understanding of the fundamental processes of social phenomena caused by complex interactions among agents. Bringing together diverse approaches to social simulation and research agendas, this book presents a unique collection of contributions from the Second World Congress on Social Simulation, held in 2008 at George Mason University in Washington DC, USA. This book in particular includes articles on norms, diffusion, social networks, economy, markets and organizations, computational modeling, and programming environments, providing new hypotheses and theories, new simulation experiments compared with various data sets, and new methods for model design and development. These works emerged from a global and interdisciplinary scientific community of the three regional scientific associations for social simulation: the North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science (NAACSOS; now the Computational Social Science Society, CSSS), the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA), and the Pacific Asian Association for Agent-bBased Approach in Social Systems Sciences (PAAA)."

This book presents the proceedings of the International Conference "Stability, Control, Differential Games" (SCDG2019, September 16 - 20, 2019, Yekaterinburg, Russia), organized by the Krasovskii Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Discussing the latest advances in the theory of optimal control, stability theory and differential games, it also demonstrates the application of new techniques and numerical algorithms to solve problems in robotics, mechatronics, power and energy systems, economics and ecology. Further, the book includes fundamental results in control theory, stability theory and differential games presented at the conference, as well as a number of chapters focusing on novel approaches in solving important applied problems in control and optimization. Lastly, it evaluates recent major accomplishments, and forecasts developments in various up-and-coming areas, such as hybrid systems, model predictive control, Hamilton-Jacobi equations and advanced estimation algorithms.

Product design is characterized by a steady increase in complexity. The main focus of this book is a structural approach on complexity management. This means, system structures are considered in order to address the challenge of complexity in all aspects of product design. Structures arise from the complex dependencies of system elements. Thus, the identification of system structures provides access to the understanding of system behavior in practical applications.

The book presents a methodology that enables the analysis, control and optimization of complex structures, and the applicability of domain-spanning problems. The methodology allows significant improvements on handling system complexity by creating improved system understanding on the one hand and optimizing product design that is robust for system adaptations on the other hand. Developers can thereby enhance project coordination and improve communication between team members and as a result shorten development time. The practical application of the methodology is described by means of two detailed examples.

The book reports on the latest advances in and applications of fractional order control and synchronization of chaotic systems, explaining the concepts involved in a clear, matter-of-fact style. It consists of 30 original contributions written by eminent scientists and active researchers in the field that address theories, methods and applications in a number of research areas related to fractional order control and synchronization of chaotic systems, such as: fractional chaotic systems, hyperchaotic systems, complex systems, fractional order discrete chaotic systems, chaos control, chaos synchronization, jerk circuits, fractional chaotic systems with hidden attractors, neural network, fuzzy logic controllers, behavioral modeling, robust and adaptive control, sliding mode control, different types of synchronization, circuit realization of chaotic systems, etc. In addition to providing readers extensive information on chaos fundamentals, fractional calculus, fractional differential equations, fractional control and stability, the book also discusses key applications of fractional order chaotic systems, as well as multidisciplinary solutions developed via control modeling. As such, it offers the perfect reference guide for graduate students, researchers and practitioners in the areas of fractional order control systems and fractional order chaotic systems.

The book provides an encompassing overview of all aspects relating to the sharing economy paradigm in different fields of study, and shows the ongoing research efforts in filling previously identified gaps in understanding in this area. Control and optimization analytics for the sharing economy explores bespoke analytics, tools, and business models that can be used to help design collaborative consumption services (the shared economy). It provides case studies of collaborative consumption in the areas of energy and mobility. The contributors review successful examples of sharing systems, and explore the theory for designing effective and stable shared-economy models. They discuss recent innovations in and uses of shared economy models in niche areas, such as energy and mobility. Readers learn the scientific challenging issues associated with the realization of a sharing economy. Conceptual and practical matters are examined, and the state-of-the-art tools and techniques to address such applications are explained. The contributors also show readers how topical problems in engineering, such as energy consumption in power grids, or bike sharing in transportation networks, can be formulated and solved from a general collaborative consumption perspective. Since the book takes a mathematical perspective to the topic, researchers in business, computer science, optimization and control find it useful. Practitioners also use the book as a point of reference, as it explores and investigates the analytics behind economy sharing.

This monograph presents a novel method of sliding mode control for switch-regulated nonlinear systems. The Delta Sigma modulation approach allows one to implement a continuous control scheme using one or multiple, independent switches, thus effectively merging the available linear and nonlinear controller design techniques with sliding mode control. Sliding Mode Control: The Delta-Sigma Modulation Approach, combines rigorous mathematical derivation of the unique features of Sliding Mode Control and Delta-Sigma modulation with numerous illustrative examples from diverse areas of engineering. In addition, engineering case studies demonstrate the applicability of the technique and the ease with which one can implement the exposed results. This book will appeal to researchers in control engineering and can be used as graduate-level textbook for a first course on sliding mode control.

This book is dedicated to Prof. Peter Young on his 70th birthday. Professor Young has been a pioneer in systems and control, and over the past 45 years he has influenced many developments in this field. This volume comprises a collection of contributions by leading experts in system identification, time-series analysis, environmetric modelling and control system design - modern research in topics that reflect important areas of interest in Professor Young's research career. Recent theoretical developments in and relevant applications of these areas are explored treating the various subjects broadly and in depth. The authoritative and up-to-date research presented here will be of interest to academic researcher in control and disciplines related to environmental research, particularly those to with water systems. The tutorial style in which many of the contributions are composed also makes the book suitable as a source of study material for graduate students in those areas.

Computational intelligence encompasses a wide variety of techniques that allow computation to learn, to adapt, and to seek. That is, they may be designed to learn information without explicit programming regarding the nature of the content to be retained, they may be imbued with the functionality to adapt to maintain their course within a complex and unpredictably changing environment, and they may help us seek out truths about our own dynamics and lives through their inclusion in complex system modeling. These capabilities place our ability to compute in a category apart from our ability to erect suspension bridges, although both are products of technological advancement and reflect an increased understanding of our world. In this book, we show how to unify aspects of learning and adaptation within the computational intelligence framework. While a number of algorithms exist that fall under the umbrella of computational intelligence, with new ones added every year, all of them focus on the capabilities of learning, adapting, and helping us seek. So, the term unified computational intelligence relates not to the individual algorithms but to the underlying goals driving them. This book focuses on the computational intelligence areas of neural networks and dynamic programming, showing how to unify aspects of these areas to create new, more powerful, computational intelligence architectures to apply to new problem domains.

In this edited collection we commemorate the 60th birthday of Prof. Christopher Byrnes and the retirement of Prof. Anders Lindquist from the Chair of Optimization and Systems Theory at KTH. These papers were presented in part at a 2009 workshop in KTH, Stockholm, honoring the lifetime contributions of Professors Byrnes and Lindquist in various fields of applied mathematics.

This book presents cutting-edge results on stability analysis and control scheme designs for networked teleoperation systems. It highlights new research on commonly encountered nonlinear teleoperation systems, including the stability analysis of teleoperation systems with asymmetric time-varying delays, stability analysis of teleoperation systems with interval time delays, and so on. Moreover, the book presents several high-performance control scheme designs for teleoperation systems when the velocity is available and unavailable, and for systems with nonlinear input. The results presented here mark a substantial contribution to nonlinear teleoperation system theory, robotic control theory and networked control system theory. As such, the book will be of interest to university researchers, R&D engineers and graduate students in control theory and control engineering who wish to learn about the core principles, methods, algorithms, and applications of networked teleoperation systems, robotic systems and nonlinear control systems.

This book presents fundamental theoretical results for designing object-oriented programming languages for controlling swarms. It studies the logics of swarm behaviours. According to behaviourism, all behaviours can be controlled or even managed by stimuli in the environment: attractants (motivational reinforcement) and repellents (motivational punishment). At the same time, there are two main stages in reactions to stimuli: sensing (perceiving signals) and motoring (appropriate direct reactions to signals). This book examines the strict limits of behaviourism from the point of view of symbolic logic and algebraic mathematics: how far can animal behaviours be controlled by the topology of stimuli? On the one hand, we can try to design reversible logic gates in which the number of inputs is the same as the number of outputs. In this case, the behaviouristic stimuli are inputs in swarm computing and appropriate reactions at the motoring stage are its outputs. On the other hand, the problem is that even at the sensing stage each unicellular organism can be regarded as a logic gate in which the number of outputs (means of perceiving signals) greatly exceeds the number of inputs (signals).

This ground-breaking volume explores social entrepreneurship from the perspective of complexity science and systems thinking. Case studies, models, simulations, and theoretical papers advance both theory and practice, providing an innovative and comprehensive look at these dynamic topics. Written by complexity theorists, international development practitioners, and experts in a variety of other disciplines, this must-have book is mandatory reading for everyone interested in this newly developing field.

This book offers a comprehensive presentation of optimization and polyoptimization methods. The examples included are taken from various domains: mechanics, electrical engineering, economy, informatics, and automatic control, making the book especially attractive. With the motto "from general abstraction to practical examples," it presents the theory and applications of optimization step by step, from the function of one variable and functions of many variables with constraints, to infinite dimensional problems (calculus of variations), a continuation of which are optimization methods of dynamical systems, that is, dynamic programming and the maximum principle, and finishing with polyoptimization methods. It includes numerous practical examples, e.g., optimization of hierarchical systems, optimization of time-delay systems, rocket stabilization modeled by balancing a stick on a finger, a simplified version of the journey to the moon, optimization of hybrid systems and of the electrical long transmission line, analytical determination of extremal errors in dynamical systems of the rth order, multicriteria optimization with safety margins (the skeleton method), and ending with a dynamic model of bicycle. The book is aimed at readers who wish to study modern optimization methods, from problem formulation and proofs to practical applications illustrated by inspiring concrete examples.

This book highlights the latest findings on nonlinear dynamical systems including two types of attractors: self-excited and hidden attractors. Further, it presents both theoretical and practical approaches to investigating nonlinear dynamical systems with self-excited and hidden attractors. The book includes 20 chapters contributed by respected experts, which focus on various applications such as biological systems, memristor-based systems, fractional-order systems, finance systems, business cycles, oscillators, coupled systems, hyperchaotic systems, flexible robot manipulators, electronic circuits, and control models. Special attention is given to modeling, design, circuit realization, and practical applications to address recent research problems in nonlinear dynamical systems. The book provides a valuable reference guide to nonlinear dynamical systems for engineers, researchers, and graduate students, especially those whose work involves mechanics, electrical engineering, and control systems.

This volume contains the proceedings of ADHS 06: the 2nd IFAC Conference on Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems, organized in Alghero (Italy) on June 7-9, 2006.
ADHS is a series of triennial meetings that aims to bring together researchers and practitioners with a background in control and computer science to provide a survey of the advances in the field of hybrid systems, and of their ability to take up the challenge of analysis, design and verification of efficient and reliable control systems. ADHS'06 is the second Conference of this series after ADHS'03 in Saint Malo.
* 65 papers selected through careful reviewing process
* Plenary lectures presented by three distinguished speakers
* Featuring interesting new research topics

This book, which resulted from an intensive discourse between experts from several disciplines - complexity theorists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, urban planners and urban designers, as well as a zoologist and a physiologist - addresses various issues regarding cities. It is a first step in responding to the challenge of generating just such a discourse, based on a dilemma identified in the CTC (Complexity Theories of Cities) domain. The latter has demonstrated that cities exhibit the properties of natural, organic complex systems: they are open, complex and bottom-up, have fractal structures and are often chaotic. CTC have further shown that many of the mathematical formalisms and models developed to study material and organic complex systems also apply to cities. The dilemma in the current state of CTC is that cities differ from natural complex systems in that they are hybrid complex systems composed, on the one hand, of artifacts such as buildings, roads and bridges, and of natural human agents on the other. This raises a plethora of new questions on the difference between the natural and the artificial, the cognitive origin of human action and behavior, and the role of planning and designing cities. The answers to these questions cannot come from a single discipline; they must instead emerge from a discourse between experts from several disciplines engaged in CTC.

This book presents a time-delay approach to the analysis and synthesis of networked control systems (NCSs) under communication constraints. Differently from other approaches, the time-delay approach to NCSs allows communication delays to be larger than the sampling intervals in the presence of scheduling protocols. The book starts from a comprehensive introduction to three main approaches to sampled-data and networked control. It then focuses on time-delay approach, and the modelling of the closed-loop systems in the form of time-delay system. It presents discontinuous (in time) Lyapunov functional constructions that are efficient for NCSs in the presence of communications delays. Further, it highlights time-delay approaches developed to model and analyze NCSs under communication constraints, with a particular focus on dynamic quantization, round-robin, try-once-discard and stochastic protocols. The results are first presented for the continuous-time NCSs and then extended to discrete-time NCSs. Discussing recent developments in Lyapunov-based analysis of NCSs under communication constraints, the book is a valuable resource for researchers interested in sampled-data and networked control, and time-delay systems, as well as for graduate students in automatic control and systems theory.

This book bridges the current gap between the theory of symmetry-based dynamics and its application to model and analyze complex systems. As an alternative approach, the authors use the symmetry of the system directly to formulate the appropriate models, and also to analyze the dynamics. Complex systems with symmetry arise in a wide variety of fields, including communication networks, molecular dynamics, manufacturing businesses, ecosystems, underwater vehicle dynamics, celestial and spacecraft dynamics and continuum mechanics. A general approach for their analysis has been to derive a detailed model of their individual parts, connect the parts and note that the system contains some sort of symmetry, then attempt to exploit this symmetry in order to simplify numerical computations. This approach can result in highly complicated models that are difficult to analyze even numerically. The alternative approach, while nonstandard, is not entirely new among the mathematics community. However, there is much less familiarity with the techniques of symmetry-breaking bifurcation, as they apply to the engineering, design and fabrication, of complex systems, in particular, nonlinear sensor devices with special emphasis on the conceptualization and development of new technologies of magnetic sensors such as fluxgate magnetometers and SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices), E-- (electric-field) sensors, and communication and navigation systems that require multiple frequencies of operation, such as radar and antenna devices as well as gyroscopic systems.

The book you hold in your hands is the outcome of the "2014 Interdisciplinary Symposium on Complex Systems" held in the historical city of Florence. The book consists of 37 chapters from 4 areas of Physical Modeling of Complex Systems, Evolutionary Computations, Complex Biological Systems and Complex Networks. All 4 parts contain contributions that give interesting point of view on complexity in different areas in science and technology. The book starts with a comprehensive overview and classification of complexity problems entitled Physics in the world of ideas: Complexity as Energy" , followed by chapters about complexity measures and physical principles, its observation, modeling and its applications, to solving various problems including real-life applications. Further chapters contain recent research about evolution, randomness and complexity, as well as complexity in biological systems and complex networks. All selected papers represent innovative ideas, philosophical overviews and state-of-the-art discussions on aspects of complexity. The book will be useful as an instructional material for senior undergraduate and entry-level graduate students in computer science, physics, applied mathematics and engineering-type work in the area of complexity. The book will also be valuable as a resource of knowledge for practitioners who want to apply complexity to solve real-life problems in their own challenging applications.