In 1949, when the North Atlantic Treaty was ratified, one of its articles explicitly noted '1hat member countries should contribute towards the further development of peaceful and friendly international relations." Specific problems related to the human environment were addressed by the Committee of Challenges of Modern Society (CCMS) of NATO, established in 1969. This provided a framework within which a series of International Technical Meetings (ITMs) on Air Pollution Modelling has been held. This volume documents the proceedings of the 18th meeting in this series. Science, like the arts...

This volume collects most of the papers presented at the International Workshop on Robustness in Identification and Control, held in Torino (Italy) in 1988. The main focal point of the workshop was Unknown But Bounded uncertainty and associated robustness issues in identification and control. Recent years have seen a growing interest in studying models which include un- known but bounded uncertainty. The motivation for dealing with such models is derived from robustness considerations. In many applications, some performance specification must be met for all admissible variations of the...

This volume provides the proceedings of the First European Workshop on Parallel Processing Techniques for Simulation which was held at the end of October 1985. The Workshop was organized within the framework of a joint project sponsored by the Commission of the European Communities under the research part of the multiannua1 programme in the field of Data Processing aming at promoting collaborative research work in the Community. The project involved collaborative work between the Complex Systems Group of the Control Systems Centre at UMIST, the Systems Reliability Service of the United...

A modern mechanical structure must work at high speed and with high precision in space and time, in cooperation with other machines and systems. All this requires accurate dynamic modelling, for instance, recognizing Coriolis and centrifugal forces, strong coupling effects, flexibility of links, large angles articulation. This leads to a motion equation which must be highly nonlinear to describe the reality. r1oreover, work on the manufacturing floor requires coordination between nachines, between each machine and a conveyor, and demands robustness of the controllers against uncertainty in...

Since the begining of the sixties, control theorists have developed a large body of knowledge concerning complex or large-scale systems theory. Using the state space approach, their purpose was to extend methods to cope with the increasingly sophisticated automation needs of man-made systems. Despite several remarkable contributions, and some successful applications, it can be stated that this theory has not yet become an engineering tool. On the other hand, the emergence of cheap and reliable microprocessors has profoundly transformed industrial instrumentation and control systems. Process...

The main characteristics of the real-world decision-making problems facing humans today are multidimensional and have multiple objectives including eco- nomic, environmental, social, and technical ones. Hence, it seems natural that the consideration of many objectives in the actual decision-making process re- quires multiobjective approaches rather than single-objective. One ofthe major systems-analytic multiobjective approaches to decision-making under constraints is multiobjective optimization as a generalization of traditional single-objective optimization. Although multiobjective...

It is in the area of Systems Diagnosis. Supervision and Control that Knowledge-Based Techniques have had their most significant impact in recent years. In this volume. Spyros Tzafestas has ably put together the current state of the art of the application of Artificial Intelligence concepts to problems of Systems Diagnosis. All the authors in this edited work are distinguished internationally. recognized experts on various aspects of Artificial Intelligence and its applications. and the coverage of the field that they provide is both readable and authoritative. The sixteen chapters break down...