The Symposium aimed at analysing and solving the various problems of representation and analysis of decision making in economic systems starting from the level of the individual firm and ending up with the complexities of international policy coordination. The papers are grouped into subject areas such as game theory, control methods, international policy coordination and the applications of artificial intelligence and experts systems as a framework in economic modelling and control. The Symposium therefore provides a wide range of important information for those involved or interested in the planning of company and national economics.

In the last two decades, the development of specific methodologies for the control of systems described by nonlinear mathematical models has attracted an ever increasing interest. New breakthroughs have occurred which have aided the design of nonlinear control systems. However there are still limitations which must be understood, some of which were addressed at the IFAC Symposium in Capri. The emphasis was on the methodological developments, although a number of the papers were concerned with the presentation of applications of nonlinear design philosophies to actual control problems in chemical, electrical and mechanical engineering.

The papers presented at the Symposium covered the areas in aerospace technology where automatic control plays a vital role. These included navigation and guidance, space robotics, flight management systems and satellite orbital control systems. The information provided reflects the recent developments and technical advances in the application of automatic control in space technology.

The control of power systems and power plants is a subject of growing interest which continues to sustain a high level of research, development and application in many diverse yet complementary areas, such as maintaining a high quality but economical service and coping with environmental constraints. The papers included within this volume provide the most up to date developments in this field of research.

The Symposium presented and discussed the latest research on new theories and advanced applications of automatic systems, which are developed for manufacturing technology or are applicable to advanced manufacturing systems. The topics included computer integrated manufacturing, simulation and the increasingly important areas of artificial intelligence and expert systems, and applied them to the broad spectrum of problems that the modern manufacturing engineer is likely to encounter in the design and application of increasingly complex automatic systems.

Papers presented at the workshop are representative of the state-of-the art of artificial intelligence in real-time control. The issues covered included the use of AI methods in the design, implementation, testing, maintenance and operation of real-time control systems. While the focus was on the fundamental aspects of the methodologies and technologies, there were some applications papers which helped to put emerging theories into perspective. The four main subjects were architectural issues; knowledge - acquisition and learning; techniques; and scheduling, monitoring and management.

These Proceedings provide valuable information on the exchange of ideas between scientists who apply nonlinear programming and optimization to real world control problems and those who develop new methods, algorithms and software. The papers deal with windshear problems, optimization of aircraft and spacecraft trajectories, optimal control for robots, the optimization of urban traffic control, general mechanical systems, multilevel inventory systems and robust control.

The twenty-seven papers cover recent advances in both empirical and theoretical aspects of man-machine interaction with special emphasis on the subjects of man-automation and man-computer interaction. They provide information on a subject which has grown rapidly in importance during recent years.

The focus of the workshop was on recent advances in the theory, applications and techniques for distributed computer control systems. Topics included: tools and methods for inner layers of DCCS; application papers presenting operational DCCS; the infiltration of true real-time or "time critical" concepts and the emergence of artificial intelligence methods in DCCS applications, leading to novel computer architectures being integrated in computer networks. The book will be of interest not only to those involved in DCCS but also software engineers and distributed computing scientists.

Information Processing is a key area of research and development and the symposium presented state-of-the-art reports on some of the areas which are of relevance in automatic control: fault diagnosis and system reliability. Papers also covered the role of expert systems and other knowledge based systems, which are needed, to cope with the vast quantities of data generated by large scale systems. This volume should be considered essential reading for anyone involved in this rapidly developing area.