Preface

Control engineering is a multidisciplinary subject, useful in a variety of fields. Process control, servosystems, telecommunications, robotics, or social system dynamics, among others, require the concourse of automatic control concepts to better understand the behaviour of the respective processes and to be able to introduce changes in their dynamics or counteract the effect of disturbances. Recent industrial trends in the implementation of control systems claim a wider perspective in the design, not just a collection of single-loop controllers, coping with a complex system with multiple interrelated variables to be controlled and having the option to manipulate multiple variables. The first step in this direction is to consider the control of multivariable systems.