These notes are based on the material presented in a series of lec tures in the IBM Systems Research Institute (ESRI) in Geneva durJng 1967-1969 to systems engineers working in the design and programming of computer systems for control and monitoring of i nustrial proc esses. The purpose of the lectures and this book is to give a survey of dif ferent approaches in developing models to describe the behavior of the process in terms of controllable variables. It does not cover the theory of control, stability of control systems, nor techniques in data acquisition or problems in instrumentation...

This book is based on lectures given by the author at the IBM European Systems Research Institute (ESRI) in Geneva. Information Theory on the syntactic level, as introduced by Claude Shannon in 1949, has many limitations when applied to information processing by computers. But in spite of some obvious shortcomings, the underlyin~ principles are of fundamental importance for systems engineers in understanding the nature of the problems of handling information, its acquisition, storage, processing, and interpretation. The lectures, as presented in this book, attempt to give an exposition of the...