The two major themes of this book are risk-sensitive control and path-integral or Hamiltonian formulation. It covers risk-sensitive certainty-equivalence principles, the consequent extension of the conventional LQG treatment and the path-integral formulation.

This book is an introduction to optimal stochastic control for continuous time Markov processes and the theory of viscosity solutions. It covers dynamic programming for deterministic optimal control problems, as well as to the corresponding theory of viscosity solutions. New chapters in this second edition introduce the role of stochastic optimal control in portfolio optimization and in pricing derivatives in incomplete markets and two-controller, zero-sum differential games.

This workshop on stochastic theory and adaptive control assembled many of the leading researchers on stochastic control and stochastic adaptive control to increase scientific exchange and cooperative research between these two subfields of stochastic analysis. The papers included in the proceedings include survey and research. They describe both theoretical results and applications of adaptive control. There are theoretical results in identification, filtering, control, adaptive control and various other related topics. Some applications to manufacturing systems, queues, networks, medicine and other topics are gien.

This is a unified collection of important recent results for the design of robust controllers for uncertain systems, primarily based on H8 control theory or its stochastic counterpart, risk sensitive control theory. Two practical applications are used to illustrate the methods throughout.

Over the last two decades, risk-sensitive control has evolved into an innovative and successful framework for solving dynamically a wide range of practical investment management problems.This book shows how to use risk-sensitive investment management to manage portfolios against an investment benchmark, with constraints, and with assets and liabilities. It also addresses model implementation issues in parameter estimation and numerical methods. Most importantly, it shows how to integrate jump-diffusion processes which are crucial to model market crashes.With its emphasis on the interconnection between mathematical techniques and real-world problems, this book will be of interest to both academic researchers and money managers. Risk-sensitive investment management links stochastic control and portfolio management. Because of its distinct emphasis on integrating advanced theoretical concepts into practical dynamic investment management tools, this book stands out from the existing literature in fundamental ways. It goes beyond mainstream research in portfolio management in a traditional static setting. The theoretical developments build on contemporary research in stochastic control theory, but are informed throughout by the need to construct an effective and practical framework for dynamic portfolio management.This book fills a gap in the literature by connecting mathematical techniques with the real world of investment management. Readers seeking to solve key problems such as benchmarked asset management or asset and liability management will certainly find it useful.

The standard theory of decision making under uncertainty advises the decision maker to form a statistical model linking outcomes to decisions and then to choose the optimal distribution of outcomes. This assumes that the decision maker trusts the model completely. But what should a decision maker do if the model cannot be trusted? Lars Hansen and Thomas Sargent, two leading macroeconomists, push the field forward as they set about answering this question. They adapt robust control techniques and apply them to economics. By using this theory to let decision makers acknowledge misspecification in economic modeling, the authors develop applications to a variety of problems in dynamic macroeconomics. Technical, rigorous, and self-contained, this book will be useful for macroeconomists who seek to improve the robustness of decision-making processes.

A rigorous introduction to optimal control theory, which will enable engineers and scientists to put the theory into practice.

This book is devoted to one of the fastest developing fields in modern control theory - the so-called H-infinity optimal control theory. The book can be used for a second or third year graduate level course in the subject, and researchers working in the area will find the book useful as a standard reference. Based mostly on recent work of the authors, the book is written on a good mathematical level. Many results in it are original, interesting, and inspirational. The topic is central to modern control and hence this definitive book is highly recommended to anyone who wishes to catch up with important theoretical developments in applied mathematics and control.

Selected papers submitted by participants of the international Conference “Stochastic Analysis and Applied Probability 2010” ( www.saap2010.org ) make up the basis of this volume. The SAAP 2010 was held in Tunisia, from 7-9 October, 2010, and was organized by the “Applied Mathematics & Mathematical Physics” research unit of the preparatory institute to the military academies of Sousse (Tunisia), chaired by Mounir Zili. The papers cover theoretical, numerical and applied aspects of stochastic processes and stochastic differential equations. The study of such topic is motivated in part by the need to model, understand, forecast and control the behavior of many natural phenomena that evolve in time in a random way. Such phenomena appear in the fields of finance, telecommunications, economics, biology, geology, demography, physics, chemistry, signal processing and modern control theory, to mention just a few. As this book emphasizes the importance of numerical and theoretical studies of the stochastic differential equations and stochastic processes, it will be useful for a wide spectrum of researchers in applied probability, stochastic numerical and theoretical analysis and statistics, as well as for graduate students. To make it more complete and accessible for graduate students, practitioners and researchers, the editors Mounir Zili and Daria Filatova have included a survey dedicated to the basic concepts of numerical analysis of the stochastic differential equations, written by Henri Schurz.

As is well known, Pontryagin's maximum principle and Bellman's dynamic programming are the two principal and most commonly used approaches in solving stochastic optimal control problems. * An interesting phenomenon one can observe from the literature is that these two approaches have been developed separately and independently. Since both methods are used to investigate the same problems, a natural question one will ask is the fol lowing: (Q) What is the relationship betwccn the maximum principlc and dy namic programming in stochastic optimal controls? There did exist some researches (prior to the 1980s) on the relationship between these two. Nevertheless, the results usually werestated in heuristic terms and proved under rather restrictive assumptions, which were not satisfied in most cases. In the statement of a Pontryagin-type maximum principle there is an adjoint equation, which is an ordinary differential equation (ODE) in the (finite-dimensional) deterministic case and a stochastic differential equation (SDE) in the stochastic case. The system consisting of the adjoint equa tion, the original state equation, and the maximum condition is referred to as an (extended) Hamiltonian system. On the other hand, in Bellman's dynamic programming, there is a partial differential equation (PDE), of first order in the (finite-dimensional) deterministic case and of second or der in the stochastic case. This is known as a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation.