Modeling, Estimation and Control of Systems with Uncertainty

Book excerpt: This volume contains the papers that have been presented at the Conference on Modeling and Control of Uncertain Systems held in Sopron, Hungary on September 3-7, 1990, organised within the framework of the activities of the System and Decision Sciences Program of IIASA - the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. The importance of the subject has drawn the attention of researchers all over the world since several years. In fact, in most actual applications the knowledge about the system under investigation presents aspects of uncertainty due to measurement errors or poor understanding of the rele vant underlying mechanisms. For this reason models that take into account these intrinsic uncertainties have been used and techniques for the analysis of their behavior as well as for their estimation and control have been devel oped. The main ways to deal with uncertainty consist in its description by stochastic processes or in terms of set-valued dynamics and this volume col lects relevant contributions in both directions. However, in order to avoid undesirable distinctions between these approaches, but on the contrary to stress the unity of ideas, we decided to organize the papers according to the alphabetical order of their authors. We should like to take this opportunity to thank IIASA for supporting the Conference and the Hungarian National Member Organization for the kind hospitality in Sopron. Finally we would like to express our gratitude to Ms. Donna Huchthausen for her valuable secretarial assistance. Vienna, February 20, 1991 GIOVANNI B.