Overview of the Volume

The genesis of this volume was the feeling of its editors that bounding had become an important enough topic, and was attracting enough attention, to require a collection of papers as a broad introduction to the field and a review of current progress. The basic idea of describing plant uncertainty by bounds is as old as toleranced engineering design. State bounding was introduced to the control engineering community in the late 1960s and parameter bounding in the early 1980s, but the subject became prominent only in the late 1980s and early 1990s, through workshops in Turin in 1988,(1) Santa Barbara(2) and Sopron(3) in 1992, papers and special sessions at conferences such as the 1988 International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (IMACS) World Congress in Paris, the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) Budapest and Copenhagen identification symposia in 1991 and 1994, the 1991 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE CDC) and 1993 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (IEEE ISCAS), and increasing exposure in leading control engineering and signal processing journals.(4,5) The topic is now widespread over a large literature, so this volume is timely.