BiblioVault - Books about Systems

Advanced Control for Constrained Processes and Systems

Fabricio Garelli

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2011

This book provides a unified, practically-oriented treatment to many constrained control paradigms. Recently proposed control strategies are unified in a generalised framework to deal with different kinds of constraints. The book's solutions are based on reference conditioning ideas implemented by means of supervisory loops, and they are complementary to any other control technique used for the main control loop. Although design simplicity is a book priority, the use of well established sliding mode concepts for theoretical analysis make it also rigorous and self-contained.

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Advanced Radar Techniques and Systems

Gaspare Galati

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1993

Within the wide and fascinating field of radar techniques and systems, this book describes in detail a number of areas of research related to system architecture and design, phenomenology, array antennas and signal processing.

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Architecture as Signs and Systems

For a Mannerist Time

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

Harvard University Press, 2004

Robert Venturi exploded onto the architectural scene in 1966 with a radical call to arms in Complexity and Contradiction. Further accolades and outrage ensued in 1972 when Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (along with Steven Izenour) analyzed the Las Vegas strip as an archetype in Learning from Las Vegas. Now, for the first time, these two observer-designer-theorists turn their iconoclastic vision onto their own remarkable partnership and the rule-breaking architecture it has informed.

The views of Venturi and Scott Brown have influenced architects worldwide for nearly half a century. Pluralism and multiculturalism; symbolism and iconography; popular culture and the everyday landscape; generic building and electronic communication are among the many ideas they have championed. Here, they present both a fascinating retrospective of their life work and a definitive statement of its theoretical underpinnings.

Accessible, informative, and beautifully illustrated, Architecture as Signs and Systems is a must for students of architecture and urban planning, as well as anyone intrigued by these seminal cultural figures. Venturi and Scott Brown have devoted their professional lives to broadening our view of the built world and enlarging the purview of practitioners within it. By looking backward over their own life work, they discover signs and systems that point forward, toward a humane Mannerist architecture for a complex, multicultural society.

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Butterflies & Barbarians

Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa

Patrick Harries

Ohio University Press, 2007

Swiss missionaries played a primary and little-known role in explaining Africa to the literate world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book emphasizes how these European intellectuals, brought to the deep rural areas of southern Africa by their vocation, formulated and ordered knowledge about the continent.

Central to this group was Junod, who became a pioneering collector in the fields of entomology and botany. He would later examine African society with the methodology, theories, and confidence of the natural sciences. On the way he came to depend on the skills of African observers and collectors. Out of this work emerged, in three stages between 1898 and 1927, an influential classic in the field of South African anthropology, Life of a South African Tribe.

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China's Strategic Arsenal

Worldview, Doctrine, and Systems

James M. Smith and Paul J. Bolt, Editors

Georgetown University Press, 2021

A critical look at how China’s growing strategic arsenal could impact a rapidly changing world order

China’s strategic capabilities and doctrine have historically differed from the United States’ and Russia’s. China has continued to modernize and expand its arsenal despite its policy of no first use, while the United States and Russia have decreased deployed weapons stocks.

This volume brings together an international group of distinguished scholars to provide a fresh assessment of China's strategic military capabilities, doctrines, and political perceptions in light of rapidly advancing technologies, an expanding and modernizing nuclear arsenal, and an increased great-power competition with the United States.

Analyzing China's strategic arsenal is critical for a deeper understanding of China’s relations with both its neighbors and the world. Without a doubt, China’s arsenal is growing in size and sophistication, but key uncertainties also lie ahead. Will China’s new capabilities and confidence lead it to be more assertive and take more risks? Will China’s nuclear traditions change as the strategic balance improves? Will China’s approach to military competition be guided by a notion of strategic stability or not? Will there be a strategic arms race with the United States? China's Strategic Arsenal provides a current understanding of these issues as we strive for a stable strategic future with China.

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Mass Performance

Systems and Citizens

Kimberly Jannarone

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Mass Performance: Systems and Citizens examines mass performance systems from the first major festival of the French Revolution through the democratic and socialist movements of the nationalizing nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, to totalitarian communist and socialist regimes in the twentieth century, ending with contemporary North Korea. While other scholars have studied specific mass performances, this study synthesizes the phenomenon across centuries and countries, focusing on its systemization. Modern nations defining or redefining their identities not only organized mass performances, but also planned to make those performances a permanent component of nationhood. Kimberly Jannarone reveals that mass performance systems, including synchronized gymnastics to choreographed rallies, encapsulate ideals and debates within emerging nations about the relationship of citizens to each other and to their leaders, playing a generative and reflective role in the culture and politics of the modern era. Mass Performance analyzes the specifics of performance choreography and design, the organizational planning and thinking behind the systems, the material circumstances of each system’s emergence, and the broader intellectual milieu in which they developed.

Although not a comprehensive study of such events, Jannarone’s analysis of the selected mass performance systems yields new theoretical perspectives on these phenomena, a central focus of her study being how political leaders find ways to create a physically coordinated mass body politic, even during times of hardship and war. By interpreting and historicizing mass assemblies of bodies, this study analyzes the choreographies and organizations that brought thousands of people together as an ensemble and kept them together in meaning-making motion.

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Power Electronic Converters and Systems

Applications, Volume 2

Marcelo Godoy Simões

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2024

Power electronics is a field in constant evolution. Power grids require further developments, and the overall society electrification requires enhanced power electronics and motor drives. New semiconductor wide bandgap devices and modern implementation hardware software play a key role, power converters for the direct current and alternating current electrical conversion, for changing voltage or frequency have become integrated with layers of communication, control, and information processing.

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Power Electronic Converters and Systems

Converters and machine drives, Volume 1

Marcelo Godoy Simões

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2024

Power electronics is a field in constant evolution. Power grids require further developments, and the overall society electrification requires enhanced power electronics and motor drives. New semiconductor wide bandgap devices and modern implementation hardware software play a key role, power converters for the direct current and alternating current electrical conversion, for changing voltage or frequency have become integrated with layers of communication, control, and information processing.

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Power Electronic Converters and Systems

Frontiers and applications

Andrzej M. Trzynadlowski

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2016

Power electronics is a branch of electrical engineering dealing with conversion and control of electric power using semiconductor power switches. This book, written by an international panel of more than 40 experts, provides an overview of modern power electronic converters and systems, and their applications. Topics covered include semiconductor power switches, multilevel, multi-input, modular, matrix, soft-switching, and Z-source converters, switching power supplies, and smart power electronic modules. Applications discussed encompass permanent magnet synchronous motor and induction motor drives, wind, photovoltaic, and automotive energy systems, shipboard power systems, the power grid, distributed generation and microgrids, uninterruptable power supplies, and wireless power transfer. Advanced control of power electronic systems is also examined. The book is essential reading for researchers and students working in power electronics, and for practising engineers specialising in the development and application of power electronic converters and systems.

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Power System Protection

Systems and methods, Volume 2

The Electricity Training Association Electricity Training Association

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1995

The worldwide growth in demand for electricity has forced the pace of developments in electrical power system design to meet consumer needs for reliable, secure and cheap supplies. Power system protection, as a technology essential to high quality supply, is widely recognised as a specialism of growing and often critical importance, in which power system needs and technological progress have combined to result in rapid developments in policy and practice in recent years. In the United Kingdom, the need for appropriate training in power system protection was recognised in the early 1960s with the launch of a correspondence course from which these books emerged and have since developed designed to meet the needs of protection staff throughout the world.

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Signals and Systems

Theory and Applications

Fawwaz T. Ulaby and Andrew E. Yagle

Michigan Publishing Services, 2018

[From the Preface] This is a signals and systems textbook with a difference: Engineering applications of signals and systems are integrated into the presentation as equal partners with concepts and mathematical models, instead of just presenting the concepts and models and leaving the student to wonder how it all relates to engineering.

The first six chapters of this textbook cover the usual basic concepts of continuous-time signals and systems, including the Laplace and Fourier transforms. Chapters 7 and 8 present the discrete-time version of Chapters 1–6, emphasizing the similarities and analogies, and often using continuous-time results to derive discrete-time results. The two chapters serve to introduce the reader to the world of discrete-time signals and systems. Concepts highlighted in Chapters 1–8 include: compensator feedback configuration (Ch. 4); energy spectral density, group delay, expanded coverage of exponential Fourier series (Ch. 5); filtering of images, Hilbert transform, single-sideband (SSB), zero and first-order hold interpolation (Ch. 6); the Cooley-Tukey FFT (Ch. 7); bilateral z-transform and use for non-minimum-phase deconvolution (Ch. 8). Chapter 9 covers the usual concepts of discrete-time signal processing, including data windows, FIR and IIR filter design, multirate signal processing, and auto-correlation and crosscorrelation. It also includes some nontraditional concepts, including spectrograms, application of multirate signal processing, and the musical circle of fifths to audio signal processing, and some biomedical applications of autocorrelation and cross-correlation. Chapter 10 covers image processing, discrete-time wavelets (including the Smith-Barnwell condition and the Haar and Daubechies discrete-time wavelet expansions), and an introduction to compressed sensing. This is the first sophomore-junior level textbook the authors are aware of that allows students to apply compressed sensing concepts. Applications include: image denoising using 2-D filtering; image denoising using thresholding and shrinkage of image wavelet transforms; image deconvolution using Wiener filters; “valid” image deconvolution using ISTA; image inpainting; tomography and the projection-slice theorem, and image reconstruction from partial knowledge of 2-D DFT values. Problems allow students to apply these techniques to actual images and learn by doing, not by only reading.

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Systems, Institutions, and Values in East and West

Engaging with János Kornai's Scholarship

Miklós Rosta

Central European University Press, 2020

Leading social scientists, empirical analysts, and policy practitioners demonstrate the various ways in which the insights of János Kornai, a renowned early analyst and critic of the command economies of Eastern European communist states, are stirring academic and policy discussions about current challenges. While dissecting the economic theories and practices in the Soviet Bloc, Kornai devised and applied concepts such as soft-budget constraints, rush versus harmonic growth, surplus versus shortage economy, non-Walrasian equilibrium, bureaucratic coordination, and the invisible power of the communist party. These concepts are commonly applied to a variety of issues in the contexts of fundamental transformation. The cases discussed in this volume include the transitional paths of post-communist economies, the pitfalls of East European market-building, economic repercussions of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the process of integration in the Eurozone.

In conclusion János Kornai’s thoughts on a variety of research topics as well as the value of democracy are included as he delivered at the conference celebrating his 90th birthday in 2018.

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Systems of Control in International Adjudication and Arbitration

Breakdown and Repair

W. Michael Reisman

Duke University Press, 1992

In a world where nations are increasingly interdependent and where their problems--whether environmental, economic, or military--have a global dimension, the resolution of international disputes has become critically important. In Systems of Control in International Adjudication and Arbitration, W. Michael Reisman, one of America's foremost scholars and practitioners of international law, examines the controls that govern arbitration—a method of alternative, private, and relatively unsupervised dispute resolution—and shows how these controls have broken down.
Reisman considers three major forms of international arbitration: in the International Court; under the auspices of the World Bank; and under the New York Convention of 1958. He discusses the unique structures of control in each situation as well as the stresses they have sustained. Drawing on extensive research and his own experience as a participant in the resolution of some of the disputes discussed, Reisman analyzes recent key decisions, including: Australia and New Zealand's attempt to stop France's nuclear testing in Muroroa; AMCO vs. Republic of Indonesia, concerning the construction of a large tourist hotel in Asia; and numerous others.
Reisman explores the implications of the breakdown of control systems and recommends methods of repair and reconstruction for each mode of arbitration. As a crucial perspective and an invaluable guide, this work will benefit both scholars and practitioners of international dispute resolution.

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Systems of Linear Inequalities

A. S. Solodovnikov

University of Chicago Press, 1980

This volume describes the relationship between systems of linear inequalities and the geometry of convex polygons, examines solution sets for systems of linear inequalities in two and three unknowns (extension of the processes introduced to systems in any number of unknowns is quite simple), and examines questions of the consistency or inconsistency of such systems. Finally, it discusses the field of linear programming, one of the principal applications of the theory of systems of linear inequalities. A proof of the duality theorem of linear programming is presented in the last section.

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Systems of Suffering

Dispersal and the Denial of Asylum

Jonathan Darling

Pluto Press, 2021

'Elegant and disturbing. A brilliant analysis of the cruel biopolitics of care in contemporary Britain' - Ash Amin

Of the many state-enacted cruelties to which refugees and asylum seekers are subjected, detention and deportation loom largest in popular consciousness. But there is a third practice, perpetrating a slower violence, that remains hidden: dispersal.

Jonathan Darling provides the first detailed account of how dispersal - the system of accommodation and support for asylum seekers and refugees in Britain - both sustains and produces patterns of violence, suffering and social abjection. He explores the evolution of dispersal as a privatized process, from the first outsourced asylum accommodation contracts in 2012 to the renewed wave of outsourcing pursued by the Home Office today.

Drawing on six years of research into Britain's dispersal system, and foregrounding the voices and experiences of refugees and asylum seekers, Darling argues that dispersal has played a central role in the erasure of asylum from public concern. Systems of Suffering is a vital tool in the arsenal of those fighting to hold the government to account for the violence of its asylum policy and practice.

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Systems with Small Dissipation

V. B. Braginsky, V. P. Mitrofanov, and V. I. Panov

University of Chicago Press, 1985

Electromagnetic and mechanical oscillators are crucial in such diverse fields as electrical engineering, microwave technology, optical technology, and experimental physics. For example, such oscillators are the key elements in instruments for detecting extremely weak mechanical forces and electromagnetic signals are essential to highly stable standards of time and frequency. The central problem in developing such instruments is to construct oscillators that are as perfectly simple harmonic as possible; the largest obstacle is the oscillator's dissipation and the fluctuating forces associated with it.

This book, first published in Russian in 1981 and updated with new data for this English edition, is a treatise on the sources of dissipation and other defects in mechanical and electromagnetic oscillators and on practical techniques for minimizing such defects. Written by a team of researchers from Moscow State University who are leading experts in the field, the book is a virtual encyclopedia of theoretical formulas, experimental techniques, and practical lore derived from twenty-five years of experience. Intended for the experimenter who wishes to construct near-perfect instrumentation, the book provides information on everything from the role of phonon-phonon scattering as a fundamental source of dissipation to the effectiveness of a thin film of pork fat in reducing the friction between a support wire and a mechanically oscillating sapphire crystal.

The researchers that V. B. Braginsky has led since the mid-1960s are best known in the West for their contributions to the technology of gravitational-wave detection, their experimental search for quarks, their test of the equivalency principle, and their invention of new experimental techniques for high-precision measurement, including "quantum nondemolition movements." Here, for the first time, they provide a thorough overview of the practical knowledge and experimental methods that have earned them a worldwide reputation for ingenuity, talent, and successful technique.

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Uncertainty Quantification of Electromagnetic Devices, Circuits, and Systems

Sourajeet Roy

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022

Uncertainty Quantification of Electromagnetic Devices, Circuits, and Systems describes the advances made over the last decade in the topic of uncertainty quantification (UQ) and stochastic analysis. The primary goal of the book is to educate and inform electronics engineers about the most recent numerical techniques, mathematical theories, and computational methods to perform UQ for electromagnetic devices, circuits, and systems.

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Voice Over IP (Internet Protocol)

Systems and solutions

Richard Swale

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2001

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has recently evolved from a simple capability for transporting voice communications into a much more powerful technology capable of changing the way voice applications are constructed, delivered, marketed and sold. Whilst VoIP has clearly provided a focus for much debate within the telecommunications industry, there has been a clear gulf between hype and reality. However the questions now being asked have migrated from 'Will it work?' to 'What will the industry look like when it is delivered at scale?'

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Wireless Communications Circuits and Systems

Yichuang Sun

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2004

This book presents a state of the art review of integrated circuits, systems and transceivers for wireless and mobile communications. Contributions from world-class researchers focus upon the most recent developments in key RF, IF and baseband components and subsystems and transceiver architecture in CMOS technology. Adopting a top-down approach from wireless communications systems, mobile terminals and transceivers, to constituent components, this book covers the whole range of baseband, IF and RF issues in a systematic way. Circuit and system techniques for design and implementation of reconfigurable low voltage and low power single-chip CMOS transceivers for both mobile cellular and wireless LAN applications are included.

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