Distributed system controls that vary in position as well as in intensity of their action (mobile controls) play an increasingly important role in science and engineering. This book introduces a new viewpoint for looking at fundamental problems of mobile control and synthesis. It indicates properties not hitherto disclosed when we switch to non-mobile classical methods. The authors consider aspects of problem formulation, and provide the main theoretical results, and analyze the role of mathematical modelling of mobile controls in a variety of processes. These include practical problems in diverse branches of science and engineering. The applications are versatile, covering mobile control problems in chemical technology, thermal physics, geofiltration, acoustics, cybernetics, pure geology, petroleum production and also engineering. The book introduces a range of ideas that enables engineers and scientists to look at fundamental problems of controllability, invariance and synthesis, from a new viewpoint.
It indicates new properties that arise in going from classical (non-mobile) controls to mobile controls, and mobile control problems are mathematically formulated in several ways, one leading to a little-studied non-linear problem of moments. Methods for treating the application of this difficult non-linear problem are given. The coverage is an unusual synthesis of the theory, modelling and applications of mobile controls.