The author offers a systematic and careful development of many aspects of structural optimization, particularly for beams and plates. Some of the results are new and some have appeared only in specialized Soviet journals, or as pro ceedings of conferences, and are not easily accessible to Western engineers and mathematicians. Some aspects of the theory presented here, such as optimiza tion of anisotropic properties of elastic structural elements, have not been con sidered to any extent by Western research engineers. The author's treatment is "classical," i.e., employing classical analysis....

Functional analysis owes its OrIgms to the discovery of certain striking analogies between apparently distinct disciplines of mathematics such as analysis, algebra, and geometry. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a number of observations, made sporadically over the preceding years, began to inspire systematic investigations into the common features of these three disciplines, which have developed rather independently of each other for so long. It was found that many concepts of this triad-analysis, algebra, geometry-could be incorporated into a single, but considerably more abstract, new...

For many years it has been an article of faith of numerical analysts that the evaluation of derivatives of complicated functions should be avoided. Derivatives were evaluated using finite differences or, more recently, using symbolic manipulation packages. The first has the disadvantage of limited accuracy. The second has disadvantages of being expensive and requiring considerable computer memory. The recent developments described in this text allow the evaluation of derivatives using simple automatic derivative evaluation subroutines pro grammed in FORTRAN or BASIC. These subroutines can...

This book deals with a very important problem in power system planning for countries in which hydrogeneration accounts for the greatest part of the system power production. During the past thirty years many techniques have been developed to cope with the long-term operation of hydro reser voirs. These techniques have been discussed in a number of publications, but they have not until now been documented in book form. This book is intended as the foundation for a special graduate course dealing with aspects of electrical engineering, operational research, water resource research, and applied...

This book is an outgrowth of formal graduate courses in multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) that the author has taught at the University of Rochester, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Kansas since 1972. The purpose is, on one hand, to offer the reader an integral and systematic view of various concepts and techniques in MCDM at an "introductory" level, and, on the other hand, to provide a basic conception of the human decision mechanism, which may improve our ability to apply the techniques we have learned and may broaden our llJ.ind for modeling human decision making....

Integral transforms are among the main mathematical methods for the solution of equations describing physical systems, because, quite generally, the coupling between the elements which constitute such a system-these can be the mass points in a finite spring lattice or the continuum of a diffusive or elastic medium-prevents a straightforward "single-particle" solution. By describing the same system in an appropriate reference frame, one can often bring about a mathematical uncoupling of the equations in such a way that the solution becomes that of noninteracting constituents. The "tilt" in the...

When the Tyrian princess Dido landed on the North African shore of the Mediterranean sea she was welcomed by a local chieftain. He offered her all the land that she could enclose between the shoreline and a rope of knotted cowhide. While the legend does not tell us, we may assume that Princess Dido arrived at the correct solution by stretching the rope into the shape of a circular arc and thereby maximized the area of the land upon which she was to found Carthage. This story of the founding of Carthage is apocryphal. Nonetheless it is probably the first account of a problem of the kind that...

Significant advances in the field of optimal control have been made over the past few decades. These advances have been well documented in numerous fine publications, and have motivated a number of innovations in electric power system engineering, but they have not yet been collected in book form. Our purpose in writing this book is to provide a description of some of the applications of optimal control techniques to practical power system problems. The book is designed for advanced undergraduate courses in electric power systems, as well as graduate courses in electrical engineering, applied...