This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Chaos, Complexity and Leadership (ICCLS). Written by interdisciplinary researchers and students from the fields of mathematics, physics, education, economics, political science, statistics, the management sciences and social sciences, the peer-reviewed contributions explore chaotic and complex systems, as well as chaos and complexity theory in the context of their applicability to management and leadership. The book discusses current topics, such as complexity leadership in the healthcare fields and tourism industry, conflict management and organization intelligence, and presents practical applications of theoretical concepts, making it a valuable resource for managers and leaders.

This book gathers papers addressing state-of-the-art research in all areas of information and communication technologies and their applications in intelligent computing, cloud storage, data mining and software analysis. It presents the outcomes of the Fourth International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Intelligent Systems, which was held in Ahmedabad, India. Divided into two volumes, the book discusses the fundamentals of various data analysis techniques and algorithms, making it a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners alike.

Recent developments in model-predictive control promise remarkable opportunities for designing multi-input, multi-output control systems and improving the control of single-input, single-output systems. This volume provides a definitive survey of the latest model-predictive control methods available to engineers and scientists today. The initial set of chapters present various methods for managing uncertainty in systems, including stochastic model-predictive control. With the advent of affordable and fast computation, control engineers now need to think about using "computationally intensive controls," so the second part of this book addresses the solution of optimization problems in "real" time for model-predictive control. The theory and applications of control theory often influence each other, so the last section of Handbook of Model Predictive Control rounds out the book with representative applications to automobiles, healthcare, robotics, and finance. The chapters in this volume will be useful to working engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, as well as students and faculty interested in the progression of control theory. Future developments in MPC will no doubt build from concepts demonstrated in this book and anyone with an interest in MPC will find fruitful information and suggestions for additional reading.

This book introduces fundamental concepts of cyber resilience, drawing expertise from academia, industry, and government. Resilience is defined as the ability to recover from or easily adjust to shocks and stresses. Unlike the concept of security - which is often and incorrectly conflated with resilience -- resilience refers to the system's ability to recover or regenerate its performance after an unexpected impact produces a degradation in its performance. A clear understanding of distinction between security, risk and resilience is important for developing appropriate management of cyber threats. The book presents insightful discussion of the most current technical issues in cyber resilience, along with relevant methods and procedures. Practical aspects of current cyber resilience practices and techniques are described as they are now, and as they are likely to remain in the near term. The bulk of the material is presented in the book in a way that is easily accessible to non-specialists. Logical, consistent, and continuous discourse covering all key topics relevant to the field will be of use as teaching material as well as source of emerging scholarship in the field. A typical chapter provides introductory, tutorial-like material, detailed examples, in-depth elaboration of a selected technical approach, and a concise summary of key ideas.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of thermodynamics. It is divided into four parts, the first of which equips readers with a deeper understanding of the fundamental principles of thermodynamics of equilibrium states and of their evolution. The second part applies these principles to a series of generalized situations, presenting applications that are of interest both in their own right and in terms of demonstrating how thermodynamics, as a theory of principle, relates to different fields. In turn, the third part focuses on non-equilibrium configurations and the dynamics of natural processes. It discusses both discontinuous and continuous systems, highlighting the interference among non-equilibrium processes, and the nature of stationary states and of fluctuations in isolated systems. Lastly, part four introduces the relation between physics and information theory, which constitutes a new frontier in fundamental research. The book includes step-by-step exercises, with solutions, to help readers to gain a fuller understanding of the subjects, and also features a series of appendices providing useful mathematical formulae. Reflecting the content of modern university courses on thermodynamics, it is a valuable resource for students and young scientists in the fields of physics, chemistry, and engineering.

Robust Integration of Model-Based Fault Estimation and Fault-Tolerant Control is a systematic examination of methods used to overcome the inevitable system uncertainties arising when a fault estimation (FE) function and a fault-tolerant controller interact as they are employed together to compensate for system faults and maintain robustly acceptable system performance. It covers the important subject of robust integration of FE and FTC with the aim of guaranteeing closed-loop stability. The reader's understanding of the theory is supported by the extensive use of tutorial examples, including some MATLAB (R)-based material available from the Springer website and by industrial-applications-based material. The text is structured into three parts: Part I examines the basic concepts of FE and FTC, providing extensive insight into the importance of and challenges involved in their integration; Part II describes five effective strategies for the integration of FE and FTC: sequential, iterative, simultaneous, adaptive-decoupling, and robust decoupling; and Part III begins to extend the proposed strategies to nonlinear and large-scale systems and covers their application in the fields of renewable energy, robotics and networked systems. The strategies presented are applicable to a broad range of control problems, because in the absence of faults the FE-based FTC naturally reverts to conventional observer-based control. The book is a useful resource for researchers and engineers working in the area of fault-tolerant control systems, and supplementary material for a graduate- or postgraduate-level course on fault diagnosis and FTC. Advances in Industrial Control reports and encourages the transfer of technology in control engineering. The rapid development of control technology has an impact on all areas of the control discipline. The series offers an opportunity for researchers to present an extended exposition of new work in all aspects of industrial control.

"The Supply of ConceptS" achieves a major breakthrough in the general theory of systems. It unfolds a theory of everything that steps beyond Physics' theory of the same name. The author unites all knowledge by including not only the natural but also the philosophical and theological universes of discourse. The general systems model presented here resembles an organizational flow chart that represents conceptual positions within any type of system and shows how the parts are connected hierarchically for communication and control. Analyzing many types of systems in various branches of learned discourse, the model demonstrates how any system type manages to maintain itself true to type. The concepts thus generated form a network that serves as a storehouse for the supply of concepts in learned discourse. Partial to the use of analogies, Irving Silverman presents his thesis in an easy-to-read style, explaining a way of thinking that he has found useful. This book will be of particular interest to the specialist in systems theory, philosophy, linguistics, and the social sciences.

Irving Silverman applies his general systems model to 22 system types and presents rationales for these analyses. He provides the reader with a method, and a way to apply that method; a theory of knowledge derived from the method; and a practical outlook based on a comprehensive approach. Chapters include: Minding the Storehouse; Standing Together; The Cognitive Contract; The Ecological Contract; The Social Contract; The Semantic Terrain.

This monograph presents new theories and methods for fixed-time cooperative control of multi-agent systems. Fundamental concepts of fixed-time stability and stabilization are introduced with insightful understanding. This book presents solutions for several problems of fixed-time cooperative control using systematic design methods. The book compares fixed-time cooperative control with asymptotic cooperative control, demonstrating how the former can achieve better closed-loop performance and disturbance rejection properties. It also discusses the differences from finite-time control, and shows how fixed-time cooperative control can produce the faster rate of convergence and provide an explicit estimate of the settling time independent of initial conditions. This monograph presents multiple applications of fixed-time control schemes, including to distributed optimization of multi-agent systems, making it useful to students, researchers and engineers alike.

This book provides an interdisciplinary approach to complexity, combining ideas from areas like complex networks, cellular automata, multi-agent systems, self-organization and game theory. The first part of the book provides an extensive introduction to these areas, while the second explores a range of research scenarios. Lastly, the book presents CellNet, a software framework that offers a hands-on approach to the scenarios described throughout the book. In light of the introductory chapters, the research chapters, and the CellNet simulating framework, this book can be used to teach undergraduate and master's students in disciplines like artificial intelligence, computer science, applied mathematics, economics and engineering. Moreover, the book will be particularly interesting for Ph.D. and postdoctoral researchers seeking a general perspective on how to design and create their own models.

This book presents a selection of cutting-edge methods that allow readers to obtain novel models for nonlinear solid mechanics. Today, engineers need more accurate techniques for modeling solid body mechanics, chiefly due to innovative methods like additive manufacturing-for example, 3D printing-but also due to miniaturization. This book focuses on the formulation of continuum and discrete models for complex materials and systems, and especially the design of metamaterials. It gathers outstanding papers from the international conference IcONSOM 2019

This book contains the proceedings of the Seventh National Conference of the Italian Systems Society. The title, Systemics of Incompleteness and Quasi-Systems, aims to underline the need for Systemics and Systems Science to deal with the concepts of incompleteness and quasiness. Classical models of Systemics are intended to represent comprehensive aspects of phenomena and processes. They consider the phenomena in their temporal and spatial completeness. In these cases, possible incompleteness in the modelling is assumed to have a provisional or practical nature, which is still under study, and because there is no theoretical reason why the modelling cannot be complete. In principle, this is a matter of non-complex phenomena, to be considered using the concepts of the First Systemics. When dealing with emergence, there are phenomena which must be modelled by systems having multiple models, depending on the aspects being taken into consideration. Here, incompleteness in the modelling is intrinsic, theoretically relating changes in properties, structures, and status of system. Rather than consider the same system parametrically changing over time, we consider sequences of systems coherently. We consider contexts and processes for which modelling is incomplete, being related to only some properties, as well as those for which such modelling is theoretically incomplete-as in the case of processes of emergence and for approaches considered by the Second Systemics. In this regard, we consider here the generic concept of quasi explicating such incompleteness. The concept of quasi is used in various disciplines including quasi-crystals, quasi-particles, quasi-electric fields, and quasi-periodicity. In general, the concept of quasiness for systems concerns their continuous structural changes which are always meta-stable, waiting for events to collapse over other configurations and possible forms of stability; whose equivalence depends on the type of phenomenon under study. Interest in the concept of quasiness is not related to its meaning of rough approximation, but because it indicates an incompleteness which is structurally sufficient to accommodate processes of emergence and sustain coherence or generate new, equivalent or non-equivalent, levels. The conference was devoted to identifying, discussing and understanding possible interrelationships of theoretical disciplinary improvements, recognised as having prospective fundamental roles for a new Quasi-Systemics. The latter should be able to deal with problems related to complexity in more general and realistic ways, when a system is not always a system and not always the same system. In this context, the inter-disciplinarity should consist, for instance, of a constructionist, incomplete, non-ideological, multiple, contradiction-tolerant, Systemics, always in progress, and in its turn, emergent.

This book presents the Proceedings of the 54th Winter School of Theoretical Physics on Simplicity of Complexity in Economic and Social Systems, held in Ladek Zdroj, Poland, from 18 to 24 February 2018. The purpose of the book is to introduce the new interdisciplinary research that links statistical physics, and particular attention is given to link physics of complex systems, with financial analysis and sociology. The main tools used in these areas are numerical simulation of agents behavior and the interpretation of results with the help of complexity methods, therefore a background in statistical physics and in physics of phase transition is necessary to take the first steps towards these research fields called econophysics and sociophysics. In this perspective, the book is intended to graduated students and young researchers who want to begin the study of this established new area, which connects physicists, economists, sociologists and IT professionals, to better understand complexity phenomena existing not only in physics but also in complex systems being seemingly far from traditional view at physics.

The book offers a novel approach to the study of the complex dynamics of cities. It is based on (1) Synergetics as a science of cooperation and selforganization, (2) information theory including semantic and pragmatic aspects, and optimization principles, (3) a theory of steady state maintenance, and of (4) phase transition, i.e. qualitative changes of structure or behavior. From this novel theoretical vantage point, the book addresses particularly three issues that stand at the core of current discourse on cities: Urban Scaling, Smart Cities and City Planning. An important consequence of "the 21st century as the age of cities", is that the study of cities currently attracts scientists from a variety of disciplines, ranging from physics, mathematics and computer science, through urban studies, architecture, planning and human geography, to economics, psychology, sociology, public administration and more. The book is thus likely to attract scholars, researchers and students of these research domains, of complexity theories of cities, as well as of general complexity theory. In addition, it is directed also to practitioners of urbanism, city planning and urban design.

Most physical systems lose or gain stability through bifurcation behavior. This book explains a series of experimentally found bifurcation phenomena by means of the methods of static bifurcation theory.

This book provides novel approach to the diagnosis of complex technical systems that are widely used in various kinds of transportation, energy, metallurgy, metalworking, fuels, mining, chemical, paper industries, etc. Effective diagnostic systems are necessary for the early detection of errors in mechatronic systems, for the organization of maintenance and for the assessment of the performed service quality. Unfortunately, the practical use of AI in the diagnosis of mechatronic systems is still quite limited and the inability to build effective mechatronic systems leads to significant economic losses and dangers. The main aim of this book is to contribute to knowledge within the topic of diagnostics of mechatronic systems by the analysis of the elements reliability characteristics, using methods, models and algorithms for diagnostics and by studying examples of model diagnostic systems using AI methods based on neural networks, fuzzy inference systems and genetic algorithms.

This book is a tribute to Julian Francis Miller's ideas and achievements in computer science, evolutionary algorithms and genetic programming, electronics, unconventional computing, artificial chemistry and theoretical biology. Leading international experts in computing inspired by nature offer their insights into the principles of information processing and optimisation in simulated and experimental living, physical and chemical substrates. Miller invented Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) in 1999, from a representation of electronic circuits he devised with Thomson a few years earlier. The book presents a number of CGP's wide applications, including multi-step ahead forecasting, solving artificial neural networks dogma, approximate computing, medical informatics, control engineering, evolvable hardware, and multi-objective evolutionary optimisations. The book addresses in depth the technique of 'Evolution in Materio', a term coined by Miller and Downing, using a range of examples of experimental prototypes of computing in disordered ensembles of graphene nanotubes, slime mould, plants, and reaction diffusion chemical systems. Advances in sub-symbolic artificial chemistries, artificial bio-inspired development, code evolution with genetic programming, and using Reed-Muller expansions in the synthesis of Boolean quantum circuits add a unique flavour to the content. The book is a pleasure to explore for readers from all walks of life, from undergraduate students to university professors, from mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers to chemists and biologists.

This book concisely presents a broad range of models and theories on social systems. Because of the huge spectrum of topics involving social systems, various issues related to Mathematics, Statistics, Teaching, Social Science, and Economics are discussed. In an effort to introduce the subject to a wider audience, this volume, part of the series "Studies in Systems, Decision and Control", equally addresses the needs of mathematicians, statisticians, sociologists and philosophers. The studies examined here are divided into four parts. The first part, "Perusing the Minds Behind Scientific Discoveries", traces the winding path of Syamal K. Sen and Ravi P. Agarwal's scholarship throughout history, and most importantly, the thought processes that allowed each of them to master their subject. The second part covers "Theories in Social Systems" and the third discusses "Models in Social Systems", while the fourth and final part is dedicated to "Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences". Given its breadth of coverage, the book will offer inquisitive readers a valuable point of departure for exploring these rich, vast, and ever-expanding fields of knowledge.

This book introduces readers to using the simple but effective Zhang-gradient (ZG) method to solve tracking-control problems concerning various nonlinear systems, while also highlighting the applications of the ZG method to tracking control for practical systems, e.g. an inverted-pendulum-on-a-cart (IPC) system and a two-wheeled mobile robot (showing its potential applications). In addition to detailed theoretical analyses of ZG controllers, the book presents a wealth of computer simulations to demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of the controllers discussed (as well as the method itself). More importantly, the superiority of ZG controllers in overcoming the division-by-zero (DBZ) problem is also illustrated. Given its scope and format, the book is well suited for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as academic and industrial researchers in the fields of neural dynamics/neural networks, nonlinear control, computer mathematics, time-varying problem solving, modeling and simulation, analog hardware, and robotics.

This book focuses on modelling and simulation, control and optimization, signal processing, and forecasting in selected nonlinear dynamical systems, presenting both literature reviews and novel concepts. It develops analytical or numerical approaches, which are simple to use, robust, stable, flexible and universally applicable to the analysis of complex nonlinear dynamical systems. As such it addresses key challenges are addressed, e.g. efficient handling of time-varying dynamics, efficient design, faster numerical computations, robustness, stability and convergence of algorithms. The book provides a series of contributions discussing either the design or analysis of complex systems in sciences and engineering, and the concepts developed involve nonlinear dynamics, synchronization, optimization, machine learning, and forecasting. Both theoretical and practical aspects of diverse areas are investigated, specifically neurocomputing, transportation engineering, theoretical electrical engineering, signal processing, communications engineering, and computational intelligence. It is a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in nonlinear dynamics and synchronization with applications in selected areas.

Discrete-Time and Discrete-Space Dynamical Systems provides a systematic characterization of the similarities and differences of several types of discrete-time and discrete-space dynamical systems, including: Boolean control networks; nondeterministic finite-transition systems; finite automata; labelled Petri nets; and cellular automata. The book's perspective is primarily based on topological properties though it also employs semitensor-product and graph-theoretic methods where appropriate. It presents a series of fundamental results: invertibility, observability, detectability, reversiblity, etc., with applications to systems biology. Academic researchers with backgrounds in applied mathematics, engineering or computer science and practising engineers working with discrete-time and discrete-space systems will find this book a helpful source of new understanding for this increasingly important class of systems. The basic results to be found within are of fundamental importance for further study of related problems such as automated synthesis and safety control in cyber-physical systems using formal methods.

This book reflects the latest developments in variable structure systems (VSS) and sliding mode control (SMC), highlighting advances in various branches of the VSS/SMC field, e.g., from conventional SMC to high-order SMC, from the continuous-time domain to the discrete-time domain, from theories to applications, etc. The book consists of three parts and 16 chapters: in the first part, new VSS/SMC algorithms are proposed and their properties are analyzed, while the second focuses on the use of VSS/SMC techniques to solve a variety of control problems; the third part examines the applications of VSS/SMC to real-time systems. The book introduces postgraduates and researchers to the state-of-the-art in VSS/SMC field, including the theory, methodology, and applications. Relative academic disciplines include Automation, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Instrument Science and Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Computer Science and Technology, Transportation Engineering, Energy and Power Engineering, etc.

This book reports on the EU-funded 7th Framework project, Go4Hybrid (Grey Area Mitigation for Hybrid RANS-LES Methods). It presents new findings concerning the accuracy and reliability of current hybrid RANS-LES methods. It describes improved formulations of both non-zonal and embedded hybrid strategies, together with their validation in a broad range of flow cases, and highlighting some key industrial applications. The book provides students, researchers and professionals in the field of applied computational fluid dynamics with a timely, practice-oriented reference guide.

The book focuses on system dependability modeling and calculation, considering the impact of s-dependency and uncertainty. The best suited approaches for practical system dependability modeling and calculation, (1) the minimal cut approach, (2) the Markov process approach, and (3) the Markov minimal cut approach as a combination of (1) and (2) are described in detail and applied to several examples. The stringently used Boolean logic during the whole development process of the approaches is the key for the combination of the approaches on a common basis. For large and complex systems, efficient approximation approaches, e.g. the probable Markov path approach, have been developed, which can take into account s-dependencies be-tween components of complex system structures. A comprehensive analysis of aleatory uncertainty (due to randomness) and epistemic uncertainty (due to lack of knowledge), and their combination, developed on the basis of basic reliability indices and evaluated with the Monte Carlo simulation method, has been carried out. The uncertainty impact on system dependability is investigated and discussed using several examples with different levels of difficulty. The applications cover a wide variety of large and complex (real-world) systems. Actual state-of-the-art definitions of terms of the IEC 60050-192:2015 standard, as well as the dependability indices, are used uniformly in all six chapters of the book.

As management theory is critical to understanding decision-making and formal leadership in organizations, comprehension of their creation, structure, and application greatly benefits and furthers the development of management systems. Cybernetics and Systems Theory in Management: Tools, Views, and Advancements provides new models and insights into how to develop, test, and apply more effective decision-making and ethical practices in an organizational setting. This critical mass of sought after knowledge with expert international contributions presents a cornerstone publication inspiring new directions of research and theory building.