This book presents a first attempt to systematically collect, classify and solve various continuous-time scheduling problems. The classes of problems distinguish scheduling by the number of machines and products, production constraints and performance measures. Although such classes are usually considered to be a prerogative of only combinatorial scheduling literature, the scheduling methodology suggested in this book is based on two mathematical tools - optimal control and combinatorics. Generally considered as belonging to two totally different areas of research and application, these seemingly irreconcilable tools can be integrated in a unique solution approach with the advantages of both. This new approach provides the possibility of developing effective polynomial-time algorithms to solve the generic scheduling problems. This book is aimed at a student audience - final year undergraduates as well as master and Ph.D. students, primarily in Operations Research, Management, Industrial Engineering and Control Systems. Indeed, some of the material in the book has formed part of the content of undergraduate and graduate courses taught at the Industrial Engineering Department of Tel-Aviv University, the Logistics Department of Bar-Ilan University and the Technology Management Department of Rolon Center for Technological Education, Israel. The book is also useful for practicing engineers interested in planning, scheduling and optimization methods. Since the book addresses the theory and design of computer-based scheduling algorithms, applied mathematicians and computer software specialists engaged in developing scheduling software for industrial engineering and management problems will find that the methods developed here can be embedded very efficiently in large applications.

This book presents a first attempt to systematically collect, classify and solve various continuous-time scheduling problems. The classes of problems distinguish scheduling by the number of machines and products, production constraints and performance measures. Although such classes are usually considered to be a prerogative of only combinatorial scheduling literature, the scheduling methodology suggested in this book is based on two mathematical tools - optimal control and combinatorics. Generally considered as belonging to two totally different areas of research and application, these seemingly irreconcilable tools can be integrated in a unique solution approach with the advantages of both. This new approach provides the possibility of developing effective polynomial-time algorithms to solve the generic scheduling problems. This book is aimed at a student audience - final year undergraduates as well as master and Ph.D. students, primarily in Operations Research, Management, Industrial Engineering and Control Systems. Indeed, some of the material in the book has formed part of the content of undergraduate and graduate courses taught at the Industrial Engineering Department of Tel-Aviv University, the Logistics Department of Bar-Ilan University and the Technology Management Department of Rolon Center for Technological Education, Israel. The book is also useful for practicing engineers interested in planning, scheduling and optimization methods. Since the book addresses the theory and design of computer-based scheduling algorithms, applied mathematicians and computer software specialists engaged in developing scheduling software for industrial engineering and management problems will find that the methods developed here can be embedded very efficiently in large applications.

This book has resulted from the activities of IFAC TC 5.2 “Manufacturing Modelling for Management and Control”. The book offers an introduction and advanced techniques of scheduling applications to cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0 systems for larger audience. This book uncovers fundamental principles and recent developments in the theory and application of scheduling methodology to cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0. The purpose of this book is to present recent developments in scheduling in cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0 and to systemize these developments in new taxonomies and methodological principles to shape this new research domain. This book addresses the needs of both researchers and practitioners to uncover the challenges and opportunities of scheduling techniques’ applications to cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0. For the first time, it comprehensively conceptualizes scheduling in cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0 systems as a new research domain. The chapters of the book are written by the leading international experts and utilize methods of operations research, industrial engineering and computer science. Such a multi-disciplinary combination is unique and comprehensively deciphers major problem taxonomies, methodologies, and applications to scheduling in cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0.

Optimum envelope-constrained filter design is concerned with time-domain synthesis of a filter such that its response to a specific input signal stays within prescribed upper and lower bounds, while minimizing the impact of input noise on the filter output or the impact of the shaped signal on other systems depending on the application. In many practical applications, such as in TV channel equalization, digital transmission, and pulse compression applied to radar, sonar and detection, the soft least square approach, which attempts to match the output waveform with a specific desired pulse, is not the most suitable one. Instead, it becomes necessary to ensure that the response stays within the hard envelope constraints defined by a set of continuous inequality constraints. The main advantage of using the hard envelope-constrained filter formulation is that it admits a whole set of allowable outputs. From this set one can then choose the one which results in the minimization of a cost function appropriate to the application at hand. The signal shaping problems so formulated are semi-infinite optimization problems. This monograph presents in a unified manner results that have been generated over the past several years and are scattered in the research literature. The material covered in the monograph includes problem formulation, numerical optimization algorithms, filter robustness issues and practical examples of the application of envelope constrained filter design. Audience: Postgraduate students, researchers in optimization and telecommunications engineering, and applied mathematicians.

Intelligent control is a rapidly developing, complex and challenging field with great practical importance and potential. Because of the rapidly developing and interdisciplinary nature of the subject, there are only a few edited volumes consisting of research papers on intelligent control systems but little is known and published about the fundamentals and the general know-how in designing, implementing and operating intelligent control systems. Intelligent control system emerged from artificial intelligence and computer controlled systems as an interdisciplinary field. Therefore the book summarizes the fundamentals of knowledge representation, reasoning, expert systems and real-time control systems and then discusses the design, implementation verification and operation of real-time expert systems using G2 as an example. Special tools and techniques applied in intelligent control are also described including qualitative modelling, Petri nets and fuzzy controllers. The material is illlustrated with simple examples taken from the field of intelligent process control.

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The author of this book made an attempt to create the general theory of optimization of linear systems (both distributed and lumped) with a singular control. The book touches upon a wide range of issues such as solvability of boundary values problems for partial differential equations with generalized right-hand sides, the existence of optimal controls, the necessary conditions of optimality, the controllability of systems, numerical methods of approximation of generalized solutions of initial boundary value problems with generalized data, and numerical methods for approximation of optimal controls. In particular, the problems of optimization of linear systems with lumped controls (pulse, point, pointwise, mobile and so on) are investigated in detail.