• Discusses open systems, object orientation, software agents, domain-specific languages, component architectures, as well as the dramatic IT-enabled improvements in memory, communication, and processing resources that are now available for sophisticated control algorithms to exploit.
• Useful for practitioners and researchers in the fields of real-time systems, aerospace engineering, embedded systems, and artificial intelligence.

Technological developments increasingly require the conflicting criteria of performance, cost, environmental impact and safety to be reconciled. The field of complexity management addresses this challenge through the integration of traditionally disparate disciplines such as control science, software engineering, artificial intelligence and biology.

Automation, Control and Complexity - An Integrated Approach is organised around four central themes:
* People and Automation, Sensing and Control, Software and Complex Systems and Complexity Management and Networks.

Technological developments increasingly require the conflicting criteria of performance, cost, environmental impact and safety to be reconciled. The f...

The advent of computer aided design and the proliferation of computer aided design tools have been instrumental in furthering the state-of-the art in integrated circuitry. Continuing this progress, however, demands an emphasis on creating user-friendly environments that facilitate the interaction between the designer and the CAD tool. The realization of this fact has prompted investigations into the appropriateness for CAD of a number of user-interface technologies. One type of interface that has hitherto not been considered is the natural language interface. It is our contention that natural...

The Encyclopedia of Systems and Control collects a broad range of short expository articles that describe the current state of the art in the central topics of control and systems engineering as well as in many of the related fields in which control is an enabling technology. The editors have assembled the most comprehensive reference possible, and this has been greatly facilitated by the publisher's commitment continuously to publish updates to the articles as they become available in the future. Although control engineering is now a mature discipline, it remains an area in which...