This conference on nonlinear control theory was organized within a special "Nonlinear Year" of the French "Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique". This volume is a collection of invited papers giving an overview of new trends in research all over the world. It was the aim of the editors to bring together theoretical contributions by pure mathematicians and more applied communications dedicated to robotics, electrical engines, biology and computer science.
There exists today an increasing interest in the study of time delay systems because delayed systems are encountered frequently in practice and time delays are often a source of instability.The first workshop in this rapidly growing field of time delay systems was organized by the Laboratoire d'Automatique de Grenoble, France and sponsored by the IFAC Technical Committee on Linear Systems.The 50 participants had the possibility to attend 4 plenary sessions and 2 invited sessions as well as 30 contributed papers selected from 40 submitted papers coming from 17 countries.The technical papers, arranged in 11 sessions, covered the field of linear time delay systems, including algebraic and structural properties, stability analysis, stabilization, Hinf control, robust stabilization and some applications.