This edited book is dedicated to Professor N. U. Ahmed, a leading scholar and a renowned researcher in optimal control and optimization on the occasion of his retirement from the Department of Electrical Engineering at University of Ottawa in 1999. The contributions of this volume are in the areas of optimal control, non linear optimization and optimization applications. They are mainly the im proved and expanded versions of the papers selected from those presented in two special sessions of two international conferences. The first special session is Optimization Methods, which was organized...

Optimum envelope-constrained filter design is concerned with time-domain synthesis of a filter such that its response to a specific input signal stays within prescribed upper and lower bounds, while minimizing the impact of input noise on the filter output or the impact of the shaped signal on other systems depending on the application. In many practical applications, such as in TV channel equalization, digital transmission, and pulse compression applied to radar, sonar and detection, the soft least square approach, which attempts to match the output waveform with a specific desired pulse, is...