The European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry (ECMI) was founded, largely due to the driving energy of Michiel Hazewinkel on the 14th April, 1986 in Neustadt-Mussbach in West Germany. The founder signatories were A. Bensoussan (INRIA, Paris), A. Fasano (University of Florence), M. Hazewinkel (CWI, Amsterdam), M. Heilio (Lappeenranta University, Finland), F. Hodnett (University of Limerick, Ireland), H. Martens (Norwegian Institute of Technology, Trondheim), S. McKee (University of Strathclyde, Scotland), H. NeURzert (University of Kaiserslautern, Germany), D. Sundstrom (The Swedish Institute of Applied Mathematics, Stockholm), A. Tayler (University of Oxford, England) and Hj. Wacker (University of Linz, Austria). The European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry is dedicated to: (a) promote the use of mathematical models in Industry (b) educate industrial mathematicians to meet the growing demand for such experts (c) operate on a European scale. ECMI is still a young organisation but its membership is growing fast. Although it has still to persuade more industrialists to join, ECMI certainly operates on a European scale and a flourishing postgraduate programme with student exchange has been underway for some time. It is perhaps fitting that the first open meeting of ECMI was held at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Glasgow is and was the industrial capital of Scotland and was, and arguably still is, Britain's second city after London; when this volume appears it will have rightly donned the mantle of the cultural capital of Europe.

ECMI, the European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry, is the European brand associated with applied mathematics for industry and organizes highly successful biannual conferences. In this series, the ECMI 2010, the 16th European Conference on Mathematics for Industry, was held in the historic city hall of Wuppertal in Germany. It covered the mathematics of a wide range of applications and methods, from circuit and electromagnetic device simulation to model order reduction for chip design, uncertainties and stochastics, production, fluids, life and environmental sciences, and dedicated and versatile methods. These proceedings of ECMI 2010 emphasize mathematics as an innovation enabler for industry and business, and as an absolutely essential pre-requiste for Europe on its way to becoming the leading knowledge-based economy in the world.

The 15th European Conference on Mathematics for Industry was held in the agreeable surroundings of University College London, just 5 minutes walk from the British Museum in the heart of London, over the ?ve warm, sunny days from 30 June to 4 July 2008. Participants from all over the world met with the commonaimofreinforcingthe roleofmathematics asanoverarching resource for industry and business. The conference attracted over 300 participants from 30 countries, most of them participating with either a contributed talk, a minisymposium pres- tation or a plenary lecture. ‘Mathematics in Industry’ was interpreted in its widest sense as can be seen from the range of applications and techniques described in this volume. We mention just two examples. The Alan Tayler Lecture was given by Mario Primicerio on a problem arising from moving oil through pipelines when temperature variations a?ect the shearing properties of wax and thus modify the ?ow. The Wacker Prize winner, Master’s student Lauri Harhanen from the Helsinki University of Technology, showed how a novel piece of mathematics allowed new software to capture real-time images of teeth from the data supplied by present day dental machinery (see ECMI Newsletter 44). The meeting was attended by leading ?gures from government, bu- ness and science who all shared the same aim – to promote the application of innovative mathematics to industry, and identify industrial sectors that o?er the most exciting opportunities for mathematicians to provide new insight and new ideas.

An increasing complexity of models used to predict real-world systems leads to the need for algorithms to replace complex models with far simpler ones, while preserving the accuracy of the predictions. This two-volume handbook covers methods as well as applications. This first volume focuses on real-time control theory, data assimilation, real-time visualization, high-dimensional state spaces and interaction of different reduction techniques.