Engineering systems have played a crucial role in stimulating many of the modern developments in nonlinear and stochastic dynamics. After 20 years of rapid progress in these areas, this book provides an overview of the current state of nonlinear modeling and analysis for mechanical and structural systems. This volume is a coherent compendium written by leading experts from the United States, Canada, Western and Eastern Europe, and Australia. The 22 articles describe the background, recent developments, applications, and future directions in bifurcation theory, chaos, perturbation methods, stochastic stability, stochastic flows, random vibrations, reliability, disordered systems, earthquake engineering, and numerics. The book gives readers a sophisticated toolbox that will allow them to tackle modeling problems in mechanical systems that use stochastic and nonlinear dynamics ideas. An extensive bibliography and index ensure this volume will remain a reference standard for years to come.

The Dynamics of Control provides a carefully integrated development of the mathematical connections between nonlinear control, dynamical systems, and time-varying perturbed systems for scientists and engineers. The central theme is the notion of control flow with its global dynamics and linearization presented in detail.

The book's scope is comprehensive and includes global theory of dynamical systems under time-varying perturbations, global and local dynamics of control systems, connections between control systems and dynamical systems and the relevant numerical methods for global dynamics, linearization, and stability. Topics are developed with a diverse and extensive selection of applied problems from control and dynamical systems.

Topics and Features:

* complete coverage of unified theory of control flows

* wide array of motivating problems from control and dynamical systems to appeal to mathematicians, scientists, and engineers

* relevant motivation and a listing of important definitions and results at the beginning of each chapter

* a compilation of essential background information in four appendices: nonlinear geometric control, topological theory of dynamical systems, computations of reachable sets, and numerical solution of Hamiltona "Jacobia "Belman equations

* discussion of numerical methods

This new text and self-study reference guide is an excellent resource for the foundations and applications of control theory and nonlinear dynamics. All graduates, practitioners, and professionals in control theory, dynamical systems, perturbation theory, engineering, physics, and nonlinear dynamics will find the book a rich source of ideas, methods, andapplications.

The Dynamics of Control provides a carefully integrated development of the mathematical connections between nonlinear control, dynamical systems and time-varying perturbed systems for scientists and engineers. The central theme is the notion of control flow with its global dynamics and linearization presented in detail. The book's scope is comprehensive and includes global theory of dynamical systems under time-varying perturbations, global and local dynamics of control systems, connections between control systems and dynamical systems and the relevant numerical methods for global dynamics, linearization and stability. Topics are developed with a diverse and rich selection of applied problems from control and dynamical systems. Thie includess applications such as: continuous flow stirred tank reactors, bacterial respiration, nonlinear oscillators, ship rolling, the Lorenz system and unfolding of bifurcation models.Topics and features: *complete coverage of unified theory of flow control *wide array of motivating problems from control and dynamical systems to appeal to mathematicians, scientists and engineers *each chapter begins with a section giving relevant motivation and listing all important definitions and results *four appendices compile essential background information: nonlinear geometric control, topological theory of dynamical systems, computations of reachable sets and numerical solution of Hamilton- Jacobi-Bellman equations *coverage of numerical methods for global dynamics, linearization and stability topics This new text/reference is an excellent resource for the foundations and applications of control theory and nonlinear dynamics. All

This book provides an introduction to the interplay between linear algebra and dynamical systems in continuous time and in discrete time. It first reviews the autonomous case for one matrix A via induced dynamical systems in {R}^d and on Grassmannian manifolds. Then the main nonautonomous approaches are presented for which the time dependency of A(t) is given via skew-product flows using periodicity, or topological (chain recurrence) or ergodic properties (invariant measures). The authors develop generalizations of (real parts of) eigenvalues and eigenspaces as a starting point for a linear algebra for classes of time-varying linear systems, namely periodic, random, and perturbed (or controlled) systems. The book presents for the first time in one volume a unified approach via Lyapunov exponents to detailed proofs of Floquet theory, of the properties of the Morse spectrum, and of the multiplicative ergodic theorem for products of random matrices. The main tools, chain recurrence and Morse decompositions, as well as classical ergodic theory are introduced in a way that makes the entire material accessible for beginning graduate students.