Many mathematical models of physical, biological and social systems involve partial differential equations (PDEs). The desire to understand and influence these systems naturally leads to considering problems of control and optimization. This book presents important topics in the areas of control of PDEs and of PDE-constrained optimization, covering the full spectrum from analysis to numerical realization and applications. Leading scientists address current topics such as non-smooth optimization, Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellmann equations, issues in optimization and control of stochastic partial differential equations, reduced-order models and domain decomposition, discretization error estimates for optimal control problems, and control of quantum-dynamical systems. These contributions originate from the “International Workshop on Control and Optimization of PDEs” in Mariatrost in October 2011. This book is an excellent resource for students and researchers in control or optimization of differential equations. Readers interested in theory or in numerical algorithms will find this book equally useful.

Splines, both interpolatory and smoothing, have a long and rich history that has largely been application driven. This book unifies these constructions in a comprehensive and accessible way, drawing from the latest methods and applications to show how they arise naturally in the theory of linear control systems. Magnus Egerstedt and Clyde Martin are leading innovators in the use of control theoretic splines to bring together many diverse applications within a common framework. In this book, they begin with a series of problems ranging from path planning to statistics to approximation. Using the tools of optimization over vector spaces, Egerstedt and Martin demonstrate how all of these problems are part of the same general mathematical framework, and how they are all, to a certain degree, a consequence of the optimization problem of finding the shortest distance from a point to an affine subspace in a Hilbert space. They cover periodic splines, monotone splines, and splines with inequality constraints, and explain how any finite number of linear constraints can be added. This book reveals how the many natural connections between control theory, numerical analysis, and statistics can be used to generate powerful mathematical and analytical tools. This book is an excellent resource for students and professionals in control theory, robotics, engineering, computer graphics, econometrics, and any area that requires the construction of curves based on sets of raw data.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Integration of Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems, CPAIOR 2018, held in Delft, The Netherlands, in June 2018. The 47 full papers presented together with 3 abstracts of invited talks and 3 abstracts of fast-track journal papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 111 submissions. The conference brings together interested researchers from constraint programming, artificial intelligence, and operations research to present new techniques or applications in the intersection of these fields and provides an opportunity for researchers in one area to learn about techniques in the others, and to show how the integration of techniques from different fields can lead to interesting results on large and complex problems.

The purpose of this book is to give a comprehensive introduction to the theory of spline functions, together with some applications to various fields, emphasizing the significance of the relationship between the general theory and its applications. At the same time, the goal of the book is also to provide new ma terial on spline function theory, as well as a fresh look at old results, being written for people interested in research, as well as for those who are interested in applications. The theory of spline functions and their applications is a relatively recent field of applied mathematics. In the last 50 years, spline function theory has undergone a won derful development with many new directions appearing during this time. This book has its origins in the wish to adequately describe this development from the notion of 'spline' introduced by 1. J. Schoenberg (1901-1990) in 1946, to the newest recent theories of 'spline wavelets' or 'spline fractals'. Isolated facts about the functions now called 'splines' can be found in the papers of L. Euler, A. Lebesgue, G. Birkhoff, J.