Idempotent analysis is a new branch of mathematical analysis concerned with functional spaces and their mappings when the algebraic structure is generated by an idempotent operation. The articles in this collection show how idempotent analysis is playing a unifying role in many branches of mathematics related to external phenomena and structures-a role similar to that played by functional analysis in mathematical physics, or numerical methods in partial differential equations. Such a unification necessitates study of the algebraic and analytic structures appearing in spaces of functions with values in idempotent semirings. The papers collected here constitute an advance in this direction.
