The presence of considerable time delays in many industrial processes is well recognized and achievable performances of conventional unity feedback control systems are degraded if a process has a relatively large time delay compared to its time constants. In this case, dead time compensation is necessary in order to enhance the performances. The most popular scheme for such compensation is the Smith Predictor, but it is unsuitable for unstable or lightly damped processes because the compensated closed-loop system always contains the process poles themselves. An alternative scheme for delay elimination from the closed-loop is the finite spectrum assignment (FSA) strategy and it can arbitrarily assign the closed-loop spectrum. One may note that the Smith Predictor Control can be found in delay systems control books and many process control books, but the FSA control is rarely included in these books. It is therefore timely and desirable to fill this gap by writing a book which gives a comprehensive treatment of the FSA approach. This is useful and worthwhile since the FSA provides not only an alternative way but also certain advantages over the Smith-Predictor. The book presents the state-of-the-art of the finite spectrum assignment for time-delay systems in frequency domain. It mainly contains those works carried out recently by the authors in this field. Most of them have been published and others are awaiting publication. They are assembled together and reorganized in such a way that the presentation is logical, smooth and systematic.
