Cybernetical physics borrows methods from both theoretical physics and control engineering. It deals with the control of complex systems is one of the most important aspects in dealing with systems exhibiting nonlinear behavior or similar features that defy traditional control techniques. This book fully details this new discipline.

This book is a concise navigator across the history of cybernetics, its state-of-the-art and prospects. The evolution of cybernetics (from N. Wiener to the present day) and the reasons of its ups and downs are presented. The correlation of cybernetics with the philosophy and methodology of control, as well as with system theory and systems analysis is clearly demonstrated. The book presents a detailed analysis focusing on the modern trends of research in cybernetics. A new development stage of cybernetics (the so-called cybernetics 2.0) is discussed as a science on general regularities of systems organization and control. The author substantiates the topicality of elaborating a new branch of cybernetics, i.e. organization theory which studies an organization as a property, process and system. The book is intended for theoreticians and practitioners, as well as for students, postgraduates and doctoral candidates. In the first place, the target audience includes tutors and lecturers preparing courses on cybernetics, control theory and systems science.

This Encyclopedia of Control Systems, Robotics, and Automation is a component of the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems EOLSS, which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. This 22-volume set contains 240 chapters, each of size 5000-30000 words, with perspectives, applications and extensive illustrations. It is the only publication of its kind carrying state-of-the-art knowledge in the fields of Control Systems, Robotics, and Automation and is aimed, by virtue of the several applications, at the following five major target audiences: University and College Students, Educators, Professional Practitioners, Research Personnel and Policy Analysts, Managers, and Decision Makers and NGOs.

This book presents detailed descriptions of chaos for continuous-time systems. It is the first-ever book to consider chaos as an input for differential and hybrid equations. Chaotic sets and chaotic functions are used as inputs for systems with attractors: equilibrium points, cycles and tori. The findings strongly suggest that chaos theory can proceed from the theory of differential equations to a higher level than previously thought. The approach selected is conducive to the in-depth analysis of different types of chaos. The appearance of deterministic chaos in neural networks, economics and mechanical systems is discussed theoretically and supported by simulations. As such, the book offers a valuable resource for mathematicians, physicists, engineers and economists studying nonlinear chaotic dynamics.

The ?rst IFIP Workshop on Autonomic Communication (WAC 2004) was held 18–19 October 2004 in Berlin, Germany. The workshop was organized by Fra- hofer FOKUS with the help of partners of the EU-funded Autonomic Com- nication Coordination Action — IST-6475 (ACCA), and under technical sp- sorship of IFIP WG6. 6 — Management of Networks and Distributed Systems. The purpose of this workshop was to discuss Autonomic Communication—a new communication paradigm to assist the design of the next-generation n- works. WAC 2004 was explicitly focused on the principles that help to achieve purposeful behavior on top of self-organization (self-management, self-healing, self-awareness, etc. ). The workshop intended to derive these common principles from submissions that study network element’s autonomic behavior exposed by innovative (cross-layer optimized, context-aware, and securely programmable) protocol stack (or its middleware emulations) in its interaction with numerous, often dynamic network groups and communities. The goals were to understand how autonomic behaviors are learned, in?uenced or changed, and how, in turn, these a?ect other elements, groups and the network. The highly interactive and exploratory nature of WAC 2004 de?ned its format — six main sessions grouped in three blocks, each block followed by a panel with all speakers of the previous block as panellists and session chairs as panel moderators. The?rstpanelaimedtohighlightthemainprinciplesguidingresearchinal- rithms,protocolsandmiddleware;thesecondpanelinvestigatedgrandchallenges of network and service composition; the third panel had to answer the question “HowDoestheAutonomicNetworkInteractwiththeKnowledgePlane?”. Panel reports were compiled by panel moderators and conclude this volume.

As systems continue to evolve they rely less on human decision-making and more on computational intelligence. This trend in conjunction to the available technologies for providing advanced sensing, measurement, process control, and communication lead towards the new field of Cyber-Physical System (CPS). Cyber-physical systems are expected to play a major role in the design and development of future engineering platforms with new capabilities that far exceed today’s levels of autonomy, functionality and usability. Although these systems exhibit remarkable characteristics, their design and implementation is a challenging issue, as numerous (heterogeneous) components and services have to be appropriately modeled and simulated together. The problem of designing efficient CPS becomes far more challenging in case the target system has to meet also real-time constraints.CyberPhysical Systems: Decision Making Mechanisms and Applications describes essential theory, recent research and large-scale usecases that addresses urgent challenges in CPS architectures. In particular, it includes chapters on:• Decision making for large scale CPS• Modeling of CPS with emphasis at the control mechanisms• Hardware/software implementation of the control mechanisms• Fault-tolerant and reliability issues for the control mechanisms• Cyberphysical user-cases that incorporate challenging decision making

This book offers an interdisciplinary theoretical approach based on non-equilibrium statistical thermodynamics and control theory for mathematically modeling shock-induced out-of-equilibrium processes in condensed matter. The book comprises two parts. The first half of the book establishes the theoretical approach, reviewing fundamentals of non-equilibrium statistical thermodynamics and control theory of adaptive systems. The latter half applies the presented approach to a problem on shock-induced plane wave propagation in condensed matter. The result successfully reproduces the observed feature of waveform propagation in experiments, which conventional continuous mechanics cannot access. Further, the consequent stress–strain relationships derived with relaxation and inertia effect in elastic–plastic transition determines material properties in transient regimes.