The acquisition of knowledge about systems and the processing of information about them are key features of modern control engineering technology. This is the theme for a volume of articles setting out the scope and content to be covered at the European Control Conference (ECC '93) in Groningen, the Netherlands. The book provides a broad overview of the field of control and a discussion of its development both from a theoretical and an engineering perspective. It contains the fully developed articles on which the plenary addresses and mini-courses of the Conference are based. Among the topics dealt with in the lectures are motion control, chemical process control, Hoo-control, design of robust controllers and learning control. The mini-courses cover differential algebra and systems, Hoo-methods in designing robust industrial controllers, and neural networks in control. Applications are discussed for problems as robotics and vision, quality control, and in the modelling, identification, and optimization of industrial processes. Research workers in the field of control and systems theory, in its broadest interpretation, will find much of interest in both their theoretical investigations and critical industrial applications.

This book contains the text of the plenary lectures and the mini-courses of the European Control Conference (ECC'93) held in Groningen, the Netherlands, June 2S-July 1, 1993. However, the book is not your usu al conference proceedings. Instead, the authors took this occasion to take a broad overview of the field of control and discuss its development both from a theoretical as well as from an engineering perpective. The first essay is by the key-note speaker ofthe conference, A.G.J. Mac Farlane. It consists of a non-technical discussion of information processing and knowledge acquisition as the key features of control engineering tech nology. The next six articles are accounts of the plenary addresses. The contribution by R.W. Brockett concerns a mathematical framework for modelling motion control, a central question in robotics and vision. In the paper by M. Morari the engineering and the economic relevance of chemical process control are considered, in particular statistical quality control and the control of systems with constraints. The article by A.C.P.M. Backx is written from an industrial perspec tive. The author is director of an engineering consulting firm involved in the design of industrial control equipment. Specifically, the possibility of obtaining high performance and reliable controllers by modelling, identifi cation, and optimizing industrial processes is discussed.