Special Section on Symbolic Methods for Complex Control Systems

© 2006 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or distribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.DOI: 10.1109/TAC.2006.876964The increasing complexity associated with many modern engineering applications, including autonomous robot guidance and navigation, process control in sensor-rich environments, and control of biological systems, has far-reaching implications for control system design. As an example, reactive, embedded software systems, interacting among themselves and remote users over communication networks, introduce a whole new set of system-level challenges, and classic control design objectives such as stability, performance, and robustness are being complemented with a number of new questions. These include the cost of hardware implementation, measured for example not only by computational requirements such as speed and memory, but also by communication requirements such as available communication bandwidth. Moreover, the complexity associated with specifying the control procedures and with verifying the behavior of the closed-loop system increasingly plays a fundamental role, especially in safety-critical control systems arising in energy and transportation networks, and in medical applications