Multivariable Control Systems

Pedro Albertos is Professor of Automatic Control (1977-), at the Department of Systems Engineering, Computers, and Control, Universidad Politecnica Valencia, (UPV), Spain, giving courses on Advanced and Intelligent Control Systems, and Systems Theory.  This school is very well thought of in the control community.  From 1999-2002 he was IFAC President, organising the IFAC World Congress in Spain, 2002. President of the Spanish automatic control association CEA-IFAC, he is promoting a stronger industry collaboration, planning regular meetings-seminars for the various working groups. His contribution will significantly enhance the prestige of Advanced Textbooks in Control and Signal Processing. In tems of level of content, Multivariable Control Systems will sit neatly between the simple one-module course and general compendium textbooks of basic undergraduate control courses and the maths-heavy titles available to senior masters and Ph.D. students. As such it will introduce specialist ideas without demanding excessive mathematical rigour to follow the text. This will make it very suitable for final-year undergraduates needing more coverage than a basic textbook and beginning postgraduates who are not yet in a position to benefit from more advanced mathematics. Professor Albertos and Doctor Sala were the editors of a volume of collected papers entitled: Iterative Identification and Control

• to Multivariable Control.- Linear System Representation: Models and Equivalence.- Linear Systems Analysis.- Solutions to the Control Problem.- Decentralised and Decoupled Control.- Fundamentals of Centralised Closed-loop Control.- Optimisation-based Control.- Designing for Robustness.- Implementation and Other Issues.

This book is well written and suitable for teaching courses. I was pleased to find that the book devoted so much attention to applications. Many industrial applications are given, which can help teachers to prepare practical works and are equally valuable to students and practising engineers. In particular, there are many case studies implemented with MATLAB. Automatica 41 (2005) 1665 - 1666 (Reviewer: Mohammed Chadli)