Daniel E. Miller – författare

A large-scale system is composed of several interconnected subsystems. For such a system it is often desired to have some form of decentralization in the control structure, since it is typically not realistic to assume that all output measurements can be transmitted to every local control station. Problems of this kind can appear in electric power systems, communication networks, large space structures, robotic systems, economic systems, and traffic networks, to name only a few. Typical large-scale control systems have several local control stations which observe only local outputs and control only local inputs. All controllers are involved, however, in the control operation of the overall system. The focus of this book is on the efficient control of interconnected systems, and it presents systems analysis and controller synthesis techniques using a variety of methods. A systematic study of multi-input, multi-output systems is carried out and illustrative examples are given to clarify the ideas.

Prof. Edward J. Davison (Ted) is a man of many talents. He started his career in music, veered into engineering physics for his undergraduate degree and moved to applied mathematics for his MASc degree; although accepted to do a PhD in cosmology, he ended up doing a PhD at Cambridge University in the area of systems control under the direction of the renowned Prof. Howard Rosenbrock. This breadth ofability underscores his ensuing thirty-five years of work in systems control, which spans the very applied to the highly theoretical. Equally important, he is arguably one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the area - he argued in the 1997 Bode Lecture that, unlike popular opinion, theory is lagging practise, with many exciting areas of science and engineering requiring input from the systems control area. Ted's contributions to systems control are many. His first journal paper was on the area of model reduction, which became a "citation classic". He is commonly regarded to have introduced the word "robust" to the area, and has published extensively in the area of robust control, ranging from his 1976 paper on the robust servomechanism problem to the more recent paper on computing the real stability radius. He was in on the ground floor ofthe control of large scale systems, introducing such fundamental notions as decentralized fixed modes, and posing and solving the decentralized robust servomechanism problem. He has made contributions to determining fundamental benefits and limitations of adaptive control.