The Encyclopedia of Systems and Control collects a broad range of short expository articles that describe the current state of the art in the central topics of control and systems engineering as well as in many of the related fields in which control is an enabling technology. The editors have assembled the most comprehensive reference possible, and this has been greatly facilitated by the publisher’s commitment to continuously publish updates to the articles as they become available in the future. Although control engineering is now a mature discipline, it remains an area in which there is a great deal of research activity, and as new developments in both theory and applications become available, they will be included in the online version of the encyclopedia. A carefully chosen team of leading authorities in the field has written the well over 300 articles, 50 of them new in the second edition. The topics range from basic principles of feedback in servomechanisms to advanced topics such as the control of Boolean networks and evolutionary game theory and this range has also been expanded to include material on such subjects as the Internet of Things, quantum control and smart grids. Because the content has been selected to reflect both foundational importance and subjects that are of current interest to the research and practitioner communities, a broad readership that includes students, application engineers, and research scientists will find entries that are of interest.

Structural properties play an important role in our understanding of linear systems in the state space representation. The structural canonical form representation of linear systems not only reveals the structural properties but also facilitates the design of feedback laws that meet various control objectives. In particular, it decomposes the system into various subsystems. These subsystems, along with the interconnections that exist among them, clearly show the structural properties of the system. The simplicity of the subsystems and their explicit interconnections with each other lead us to a deeper insight into how feedback control would take effect on the system, and thus to the explicit construction of feedback laws that meet our design specifications. The discovery of structural canonical forms and their applications in feedback design for various performance specifications has been an active area of research for a long time. The effectiveness of the structural decomposition approach has also been extensively explored in nonlinear systems and control theory in the recent past. The aim of this book is to systematically present various canonical represen­ tations of the linear system, that explicitly reveal different structural properties of the system, and to report on some recent developments on its utilization in sys­ tem analysis and design.

The Encyclopedia of Systems and Control collects a broad range of short expository articles that describe the current state of the art in the central topics of control and systems engineering as well as in many of the related fields in which control is an enabling technology. The editors have assembled the most comprehensive reference possible, and this has been greatly facilitated by the publisher’s commitment to continuously publish updates to the articles as they become available in the future. Although control engineering is now a mature discipline, it remains an area in which there is a great deal of research activity, and as new developments in both theory and applications become available, they will be included in the online version of the encyclopedia. A carefully chosen team of leading authorities in the field has written the well over 300 articles, 50 of them new in the second edition. The topics range from basic principles of feedback in servomechanisms to advanced topics such as the control of Boolean networks and evolutionary game theory and this range has also been expanded to include material on such subjects as the Internet of Things, quantum control and smart grids. Because the content has been selected to reflect both foundational importance and subjects that are of current interest to the research and practitioner communities, a broad readership that includes students, application engineers, and research scientists will find entries that are of interest.