A central theme in the study of dynamic systems is the modelling and control of uncertain systems. While ‘uncertainty’ has long been a strong motivating factor behind many techniques developed in the modelling, control, statistics and mathematics communities, the past decade, in particular, has witnessed remarkable progress in this area with the emergence of a number of powerful newmethodsforbothmodellingandcontrollinguncertaindynamicsystems. The speci?c objective of this book is to describe and review some of these exciting new approaches within a single volume. Our approach was to invite some of the leading researchers in this area to contribute to this book by submitting both tutorial papers on their speci?c area of research, and to submit more focussed research papers to document some of the latest results in the area. We feel that collecting some of the main results together in this manner is particularly important as many of the important ideas that emerged in the past decade were derived in a variety of academic disciplines. By providing both tutorial and researchpaperswehopetobeabletoprovidetheinterestedreaderwithsu?cient background to appreciate some of the main concepts from a variety of related, but nevertheless distinct ?elds, and to provide a ?avor of how these results are currently being used to cope with ‘uncertainty. ’ It is our sincere hope that the availability of these results within a single volume will lead to further cro- fertilization of ideas and act as a spark for further research in this important area of applied mathematics.

Synopsis

This book presents the outcome of the European Summer School on Multi-agent Control, held in Maynooth, Ireland in September 2003.The past decade witnessed remarkable progress in the area of dynamic systems with the emergence of a number of powerful methods for both modeling and controlling uncertain dynamic systems. The first two parts of this book present tutorial lectures by leading researchers in the area introducing the reader to recent achievements on switching and control and on Gaussian processes. The third part is devoted to the presentation of original research contributions in the area; among the topics addressed are car control, bounding algorithms, networked control systems, the theory of linear systems, Bayesian modeling, and surveying multiagent systems.

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