Adaptive Systems: An Introduction

Loosely speaking, adaptive systems are designed to deal with, to adapt to, chang­ ing environmental conditions whilst maintaining performance objectives. Over the years, the theory of adaptive systems evolved from relatively simple and intuitive concepts to a complex multifaceted theory dealing with stochastic, nonlinear and infinite dimensional systems. This book provides a first introduction to the theory of adaptive systems. The book grew out of a graduate course that the authors taught several times in Australia, Belgium, and The Netherlands for students with an engineering and/or mathemat­ ics background. When we taught the course for the first time, we felt that there was a need for a textbook that would introduce the reader to the main aspects of adaptation with emphasis on clarity of presentation and precision rather than on comprehensiveness. The present book tries to serve this need. We expect that the reader will have taken a basic course in linear algebra and mul­ tivariable calculus. Apart from the basic concepts borrowed from these areas of mathematics, the book is intended to be self contained.

From the reviews:

"This book is intended to be a first introduction to the theory of adaptive systems for graduate students. It treats exclusively deterministic adaptive control in a discrete-time formulation.... The basic course material contained in Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 is supplemented with the presentation of more advanced problems and tools such as well-posedness of the control problem during adaptation (Chapter 7), averaging techniques for analysis of adaptive systems (Chapter 8), and global dynamical analysis of adaptive systems operating in a plant-model mismatch situation (Chapter 9)." ―Mathematical Reviews

"The book is based on graduate courses taught by both authors and is intended as a text-book. Therefore it is self contained and only basic knowledge of linear algebra and ordinary differential equations is needed. ... cover the basic theory of adaptive systems and can be used for a one trimester course. ... The book is accompanied by many solved and unsolved exercises, two Maple procedures and a large bibliography." (EMS Newsletter, Issue 27, March, 1998)