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ENTROPY IN CONTROL ENGINEERING
by George N Saridis (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA)
This book attempts to couple control engineering with modern developments in science, through the concept of entropy. Such disciplines as intelligent machines, economics, manufacturing, environmental systems, waste etc. can be favorably affected and their performance can be improved or their catastrophic effects minimized. Entropy is used as the unifying measure of the various, seemingly disjoint, disciplines to represent the cost of producing work that improves the standard of living, both in engineering and in science. Modeling is done through probabilistic methods, thus establishing the irreversibility of the processes involved. This is in accordance with the modern view of science. In addition, the behavior of control for an arbitrary but fixed controller away from the optimal (equilibrium) has been obtained, the analytic expression of which should lead to chaotic solutions. The control activity is explained, based on the principle that control is making a system do what we want it to do. This helps to relate control theory with the sciences.
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