The Symposium covered three major areas: adaptive control, identification and signal processing. In all three, new developments were discussed covering both theoretical and applications research. Within the subject area of adaptive control the discussion centred around the challenges of robust control design to unmodelled dynamics, robust parameter estimation and enhanced performance from the estimator, while the papers on identification took the theme of it being a bridge between adaptive control and signal processing. The final area looked at two aspects of signal processing: recursive estimation and adaptive filters.

Leading academic and industrial researchers working with adaptive systems and signal processing have been given the opportunity to exchange ideas, concepts and solutions at the IFAC Symposia on Adaptive Systems in Control and Signal Processing. This postprint volume contains all those papers which were presented at the 5th IFAC Symposium in Budapest in 1995. The technical program was composed of a number of invited and contributed sessions and a special case study session, providing a good balance between applications and theory oriented papers.

Adaptive Systems remain a very interesting field of theoretical research, extended by methodological studies and an increasing number of applications. The plenary papers, invited sessions and contributed sessions focused on many aspects of adaptive systems, such as systems identification and modelling, adaptive control of nonlinear systems and theoretical issues in adaptive control. Also covered were methodological aspects and applications of adaptive control, intelligent tuning and adaptive signal processing.

The twenty-seven papers cover recent advances in both empirical and theoretical aspects of man-machine interaction with special emphasis on the subjects of man-automation and man-computer interaction. They provide information on a subject which has grown rapidly in importance during recent years.

In the last two decades, the development of specific methodologies for the control of systems described by nonlinear mathematical models has attracted an ever increasing interest. New breakthroughs have occurred which have aided the design of nonlinear control systems. However there are still limitations which must be understood, some of which were addressed at the IFAC Symposium in Capri. The emphasis was on the methodological developments, although a number of the papers were concerned with the presentation of applications of nonlinear design philosophies to actual control problems in chemical, electrical and mechanical engineering.

The control of power systems and power plants is a subject of growing interest which continues to sustain a high level of research, development and application in many diverse yet complementary areas, such as maintaining a high quality but economical service and coping with environmental constraints. The papers included within this volume provide the most up to date developments in this field of research.

Information Processing is a key area of research and development and the symposium presented state-of-the-art reports on some of the areas which are of relevance in automatic control: fault diagnosis and system reliability. Papers also covered the role of expert systems and other knowledge based systems, which are needed, to cope with the vast quantities of data generated by large scale systems. This volume should be considered essential reading for anyone involved in this rapidly developing area.