Control of the Safety Factor Profile in a Tokamak uses Lyapunov techniques to address a challenging problem for which even the simplest physically relevant models are represented by nonlinear, time-dependent, partial differential equations (PDEs). This is because of the spatiotemporal dynamics of transport phenomena (magnetic flux, heat, densities, etc.) in the anisotropic plasma medium.Robustness considerations are ubiquitous in the analysis and control design since direc...

This book mostly results from a selection of papers presented during the 11th IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Workshop on Time-Delay Systems, which took place in Grenoble, France, February 4 - 6, 2013. During this event, 37 papers were presented. Taking into account the reviewers' evaluation and the papers' presentation the best papers have been selected and collected into the present volume. The authors of 13 selected papers were invited to participate to this book an...

The origin of the word synchronization is a greek root, meaning "to share the common time". The original meaning of synchronization has been maintained up to now in the colloquial use of this word, as agreement or correlation in time of different processes. Historically, the analysis of synchronization phenomena in the evolution of dynamical systems has been a subject of active investigation since the earlier days of physics. Recently, the search for synchronization has moved to chaotic sy...

Extremum-seeking control tracks a varying maximum or minimum in a performance function such as output or cost. It attempts to determine the optimal performance of a control system as it operates, thereby reducing downtime and the need for system analysis. Extremum-seeking Control and Applications is divided into two parts. In the first, the authors review existing analog-optimization-based extremum-seeking control including gradient-, perturbation- and sliding-mode-based control designs. T...

This book is a collection of selected papers presented at the 10th International Conference on Scientific Computing in Electrical Engineering (SCEE), held in Wuppertal, Germany in 2014. The book is divided into five parts, reflecting the main directions of SCEE 2014: 1. Device Modeling, Electric Circuits and Simulation, 2. Computational Electromagnetics, 3. Coupled Problems, 4. Model Order Reduction, and 5. Uncertainty Quantification. Each part starts with a general introduction followed b...

The Finite Element Method: Its Basis and Fundamentals offers a complete introduction to the basis of the finite element method, covering fundamental theory and worked examples in the detail required for readers to apply the knowledge to their own engineering problems and understand more advanced applications. This edition sees a significant rearrangement of the book's content to enable clearer development of the finite element method, with major new chapters and sections added to cover: - ...

Voronoi diagrams partition space according to the influence certain sites exert on their environment. Since the 17th century, such structures play an important role in many areas like Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Ecology, Economics, Mathematics and Computer Science. They help to describe zones of political influence, to determine the hospital nearest to an accident site, to compute collision-free paths for mobile robots, to reconstruct curves and surfaces from sample points, to ...

Quantum computers can (in theory) solve certain problems far faster than a classical computer running any known classical algorithm. While existing technologies for building quantum computers are in their infancy, it is not too early to consider their scalability and reliability in the context of the design of large-scale quantum computers. To architect such systems, one must understand what it takes to design and model a balanced, fault-tolerant quantum computer architecture. The goal of ...

This book presents the features and advantages offered by complex networks in the machine learning domain. In the first part, an overview on complex networks and network-based machine learning is presented, offering necessary background material. In the second part, we describe in details some specific techniques based on complex networks for supervised, non-supervised, and semi-supervised learning. Particularly, a stochastic particle competition technique for both non-supervised and semi-...

Using fundamentals of communication theory, thermodynamics, information theory and propagation theory, this book explains the universal principles underlying a diverse range of electro-optical systems. From fiber optics and infra-red imaging to free space communications and laser remote sensing, the authors relate key concepts in science and device engineering to practical systems issues. A broad spectrum of coherent and incoherent imaging and communications systems is considered, accompan...

This book gives an introduction to the finite element method as a general computational method for solving partial differential equations approximately. Our approach is mathematical in nature with a strong focus on the underlying mathematical principles, such as approximation properties of piecewise polynomial spaces, and variational formulations of partial differential equations, but with a minimum level of advanced mathematical machinery from functional analysis and partial differential ...

David Middleton was a towering figure of 20th Century engineering and science and one of the founders of statistical communication theory. During the second World War, the young David Middleton, working with Van Fleck, devised the notion of the matched filter, which is the most basic method used for detecting signals in noise. Over the intervening six decades, the contributions of Middleton have become classics. This collection of essays by leading scientists, engineers and colleagues of D...