Space vehicles have become increasingly complex in recent years, and the number of missions has multiplied as a result of extending frontiers in the exploration of our planetary system and the universe beyond. The advancement of automatic control in aerospace reflects these developments. Key areas covered in these proceedings include: the size and complexity of spacecrafts and the increasingly stringent performance requirements to be fulfilled in a harsh and unpredictable environment; the merger of space vehicles and airplanes into space planes to launch and retrieve payloads by reusable winged vehicles; and the demand to increase space automation and autonomy to reduce human involvement as much as possible in manned, man-tended and unmanned missions. This volume covers not only the newly evolving key technologies but also the classical issues of guidance, navigation and control.

An important, successful area for control systems development is that of state-of-the-art aeronautical and space related technologies. Leading researchers and practitioners within this field have been given the opportunity to exchange ideas and discuss results at the IFAC symposia on automatic control in aerospace. The key research papers presented at the latest in the series have been put together in this publication to provide a detailed assessment of present and future developments of these control system technologies.

This conference, organized jointly by UTC and INRIA, is the biennial general conference of the IFIP Technical Committee 7 (System Modelling and Optimization), and reflects the activity of its members and working groups. These proceedings contain a collection of papers (82 from the more than 400 submitted) as well as the plenary lectures presented at the conference.

This book presents the most important and crucial problems of space automation in context of future exploration programs. These programs could involve such issues as space situational awareness program, planetary protection, exploitation of minerals, assembly, manufacturing, and search for new habitable location for next human generations. The future exploration of Space and related activities will involve robots. In particular, new autonomous robots need to be developed with high degree of intelligence. Such robots would make space exploration possible but also they would make space automation an important factor in variety of activities related to Space.

This book contains the proceedings ofthe meeting on "Applied Mathematics in the Aerospace Field," held in Erice, Sicily, Italy from September 3 to September 10, 1991. The occasion of the meeting was the 12th Course of the School of Mathematics "Guido Stampacchia," directed by Professor Franco Giannessi of the University of Pisa. The school is affiliated with the International Center for Scientific Culture "Ettore Majorana," which is directed by Professor Antonino Zichichi of the University of Bologna. The objective of the course was to give a perspective on the state-of the-art and research trends concerning the application of mathematics to aerospace science and engineering. The course was structured with invited lectures and seminars concerning fundamental aspects of differential equa tions, mathematical programming, optimal control, numerical methods, per turbation methods, and variational methods occurring in flight mechanics, astrodynamics, guidance, control, aircraft design, fluid mechanics, rarefied gas dynamics, and solid mechanics. The book includes 20 chapters by 23 contributors from the United States, Germany, and Italy and is intended to be an important reference work on the application of mathematics to the aerospace field. It reflects the belief of the course directors that strong interaction between mathematics and engineering is beneficial, indeed essential, to progresses in both areas.

Resources should be used sparingly both from a point of view of economy and eco logy. Thus in controlling industrial, economical and social processes, optimization is the tool of choice. In this area of applied numerical analysis, the INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF AUTOMATIC CONTROL (IFAC) acts as a link between research groups in universities, national research laboratories and industry. For this pur pose, the technical committee Mathematics of Control of IFAC organizes biennial conferences with the objective of bringing together experts to exchange ideas, ex periences and future developments in control applications of optimization. There should be a genuine feedback loop between mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers and software developers. This loop should include the design, application and implementation of algorithms. The contributions of industrial practitioners are especially important. These proceedings contain selected papers from a workshop on CONTROL Ap PLICATIONS OF OPTIMIZATION, which took place at the Fachhochschule Miinchen in September 1992. The workshop was the ninth in a series of very successful bien nial meetings, starting with the Joint Automatic Control Conference in Denver in 1978 and followed by conferences in London, Oberpfaffenhofen, San Francisco, Ca pri, Tbilisi and Paris. The workshop was attended by ninety researchers from four continents. This volume represents the state of the art in the field, with emphasis on progress made since the publication of the proceedings of the Capri meeting, edited by G. di Pillo under the title 'Control Applications of Optimization and Nonlinear Programming'.