The acquisition of knowledge about systems and the processing of information about them are key features of modern control engineering technology. This is the theme for a volume of articles setting out the scope and content to be covered at the European Control Conference (ECC '93) in Groningen, the Netherlands. The book provides a broad overview of the field of control and a discussion of its development both from a theoretical and an engineering perspective. It contains the fully developed articles on which the plenary addresses and mini-courses of the Conference are based.

This book contains the text of the plenary lectures and the mini-courses of the European Control Conference (ECC'93) held in Groningen, the Netherlands, June 2S-July 1, 1993. However, the book is not your usu- al conference proceedings. Instead, the authors took this occasion to take a broad overview of the field of control and discuss its development both from a theoretical as well as from an engineering perpective. The first essay is by the key-note speaker ofthe conference, A.G.J. Mac- Farlane. It consists of a non-technical discussion of information processing and knowledge acquisition as...