Since its origins in the 1940s, the subject of decision making under uncertainty has grown into a diversified area with application in several branches of engineering and in those areas of the social sciences concerned with policy analysis and prescription. These approaches required a computing capacity too expensive for the time, until the ability to collect and process huge quantities of data engendered an explosion of work in the area. This book provides succinct and rigorous treatment of the foundations of stochastic control; a unified approach to filtering, estimation, prediction, and stochastic and adaptive control; and the conceptual framework necessary to understand current trends in stochastic control, data mining, machine learning, and robotics.

Over the past decades, although stochastic system control has been studied intensively within the field of control engineering, all the modelling and control strategies developed so far have concentrated on the performance of one or two output properties of the system. such as minimum variance control and mean value control. The general assumption used in the formulation of modelling and control strategies is that the distribution of the random signals involved is Gaussian. In this book, a set of new approaches for the control of the output probability density function of stochastic dynamic systems (those subjected to any bounded random inputs), has been developed. In this context, the purpose of control system design becomes the selection of a control signal that makes the shape of the system outputs p.d.f. as close as possible to a given distribution. The book contains material on the subjects of: - Control of single-input single-output and multiple-input multiple-output stochastic systems; - Stable adaptive control of stochastic distributions; - Model reference adaptive control; - Control of nonlinear dynamic stochastic systems; - Condition monitoring of bounded stochastic distributions; - Control algorithm design; - Singular stochastic systems. A new representation of dynamic stochastic systems is produced by using B-spline functions to descripe the output p.d.f. Advances in Industrial Control aims to report and encourage 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.

In the mathematical treatment of many problems which arise in physics, economics, engineering, management, etc., the researcher frequently faces two major difficulties: infinite dimensionality and randomness of the evolution process. Infinite dimensionality occurs when the evolution in time of a process is accompanied by a space-like dependence; for example, spatial distribution of the temperature for a heat-conductor, spatial dependence of the time-varying displacement of a membrane subject to external forces, etc. Randomness is intrinsic to the mathematical formulation of many phenomena, such as fluctuation in the stock market, or noise in communication networks. Control theory of distributed parameter systems and stochastic systems focuses on physical phenomena which are governed by partial differential equations, delay-differential equations, integral differential equations, etc., and stochastic differential equations of various types. This has been a fertile field of research with over 40 years of history, which continues to be very active under the thrust of new emerging applications. Among the subjects covered are: Control of distributed parameter systems; Stochastic control; Applications in finance/insurance/manufacturing; Adapted control; Numerical approximation . It is essential reading for applied mathematicians, control theorists, economic/financial analysts and engineers.

This book provides recent results on the stochastic approximation of systems by weak convergence techniques. General and particular schemes of proofs for average, diffusion, and Poisson approximations of stochastic systems are presented, allowing one to simplify complex systems and obtain numerically tractable models.The systems discussed in the book include stochastic additive functionals, dynamical systems, stochastic integral functionals, increment processes and impulsive processes. All these systems are switched by Markov and semi-Markov processes whose phase space is considered in asymptotic split and merging schemes. Most of the results from semi-Markov processes are new and presented for the first time in this book.

The literature on systems seems to have been growing almost expo nentially during the last decade and one may question whether there is need for another book. In the author's view, most of the literature on 'systems' is either technical in mathematical sense or technical ifF engineering sense (with technical words such as noise, filtering etc. ) and not easily accessible to researchers is other fields, in particular not to economists, econometricians and quantitative researchers in so cial sciences. This is unfortunate, because achievements in the rather 'young' science of system theory and system engineering are of impor tance for modelling, estimation and regulation (control) problems in other branches of science. State space mode~iing; the concept of ob servability and controllability; the mathematical formulations of sta bility; the so-called canonical forms; prediction error e~timation; optimal control and Kalman filtering are some examples of results of system theory and system engineering which proved to be successful in practice. A brief summary of system theoretical concepts is given in Chapter II where an attempt has been made to translate the concepts in to the more 'familiar' language used in econometrics and social sciences by means of examples. By interrelating concepts and results from system theory with those from econometrics and social sciences, the author has attempted to narrow the gap between the more technical sciences such as engi neering and social sciences and econometrics, and to contribute to either side.

Probability theory. Stochastic processes. Markov renewal processes. Stochastic models for one-unit systems. Stochastic models for two-unit redundant systems. Stochastic models for fault-tolerant computing systems. Laplace-stieltjes transforms. Signal-flow graphs.

A recent development in SDC-related problems is the establishment of intelligent SDC models and the intensive use of LMI-based convex optimization methods. Within this theoretical framework, control parameter determination can be designed and stability and robustness of closed-loop systems can be analyzed. This book describes the new framework of SDC system design and provides a comprehensive description of the modelling of controller design tools and their real-time implementation. It starts with a review of current research on SDC and moves on to some basic techniques for modelling and controller design of SDC systems. This is followed by a description of controller design for fixed-control-structure SDC systems, PDF control for general input- and output-represented systems, filtering designs, and fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) for SDC systems. Many new LMI techniques being developed for SDC systems are shown to have independent theoretical significance for robust control and FDD problems.

This book is dedicated to Jinhua Cao on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Jinhua Cao is one of the most famous reliability theorists. His main contributions include: published over 100 influential scientific papers; published an interesting reliability book in Chinese in 1986, which has greatly influenced the reliability of education, academic research and engineering applications in China; initiated and organized Reliability Professional Society of China (the first part of Operations Research Society of China) since 1981. The high admiration that Professor Cao enjoys in the reliability community all over the world was witnessed by the enthusiastic response of each contributor in this book. The contributors are leading researchers with diverse research perspectives. The research areas of the book iclude a broad range of topics related to reliability models, queueing theory, manufacturing systems, supply chain finance, risk management, Markov decision processes, blockchain and so forth. The book consists of a brief Preface describing the main achievements of Professor Cao; followed by congratulations from Professors Way Kuo and Wei Wayne Li, and by Operations Research Society of China, and Reliability Professional Society of China; and further followed by 25 articles roughly grouped together. Most of the articles are written in a style understandable to a wide audience. This book is useful to anyone interested in recent developments in reliability, network security, system safety, and their stochastic modeling and analysis.

Optimal stochastic control; Stochastic optimisation; Stochastic processes; Algorithms; Information; Parameter estimation; Applications.