From the very beginning in the late 1950s of the basic ideas of optimal control, attitudes toward the topic in the scientific and engineering community have ranged from an excessive enthusiasm for its reputed capability ofsolving almost any kind of problem to an (equally) unjustified rejection of it as a set of abstract mathematical concepts with no real utility. The truth, apparently, lies somewhere between these two extremes. Intense research activity in the field of optimization, in particular with reference to robust control issues, has caused it to be regarded as a source of numerous...