Visakan Kadirkamanathan

This book is a practical introduction to the safe operation and control of critical systems in defense, industrial, and healthcare applications. It highlights system engineering processes and presents an overview of the equipment health monitoring (EHM) functional architecture and algorithm design. The book also explores machine learning functions, such as feature extraction, data visualization and model boundaries. The need for intelligent diagnostics and proposed health monitoring framework is increasingly important within sensing technology, big data analytics and grid capabilities. This resource, packed with case studies from industrial and healthcare settings, identifies key problems along with various techniques that address the current issues as well as future developments in the field. A MATLAB code is included to assist engineers with projects in the field.

This authored monograph presents the use of dynamic spatiotemporal modeling tools for the identification of complex underlying processes in conflict, such as diffusion, relocation, heterogeneous escalation, and volatility. The authors use ideas from statistics, signal processing, and ecology, and provide a predictive framework which is able to assimilate data and give confidence estimates on the predictions. The book also demonstrates the methods on the WikiLeaks Afghan War Diary, the results showing that this approach allows deeper insights into conflict dynamics and allows a strikingly statistically accurate forward prediction of armed opposition group activity in 2010, based solely on data from preceding years. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and practitioners in the involved fields but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

The field of intelligent control has recently emerged as a response to the challenge of controlling highly complex and uncertain nonlinear systems. It attempts to endow the controller with the key properties of adaptation, learn­ ing and autonomy. The field is still immature and there exists a wide scope for the development of new methods that enhance the key properties of in­ telligent systems and improve the performance in the face of increasingly complex or uncertain conditions. The work reported in this book represents a step in this direction. A num­ ber of original neural network-based adaptive control designs are introduced for dealing with plants characterized by unknown functions, nonlinearity, multimodal behaviour, randomness and disturbances. The proposed schemes achieve high levels of performance by enhancing the controller's capability for adaptation, stabilization, management of uncertainty, and learning. Both deterministic and stochastic plants are considered. In the deterministic case, implementation, stability and convergence is­ sues are addressed from the perspective of Lyapunov theory. When compared with other schemes, the methods presented lead to more efficient use of com­ putational storage and improved adaptation for continuous-time systems, and more global stability results with less prior knowledge in discrete-time sys­ tems.

The field of intelligent control has recently emerged as a response to the challenge of controlling highly complex and uncertain nonlinear systems. It attempts to endow the controller with the key properties of adaptation, learn­ ing and autonomy. The field is still immature and there exists a wide scope for the development of new methods that enhance the key properties of in­ telligent systems and improve the performance in the face of increasingly complex or uncertain conditions. The work reported in this book represents a step in this direction. A num­ ber of original neural network-based adaptive control designs are introduced for dealing with plants characterized by unknown functions, nonlinearity, multimodal behaviour, randomness and disturbances. The proposed schemes achieve high levels of performance by enhancing the controller's capability for adaptation, stabilization, management of uncertainty, and learning. Both deterministic and stochastic plants are considered. In the deterministic case, implementation, stability and convergence is­ sues are addressed from the perspective of Lyapunov theory. When compared with other schemes, the methods presented lead to more efficient use of com­ putational storage and improved adaptation for continuous-time systems, and more global stability results with less prior knowledge in discrete-time sys­ tems.