Special Issue on “Advances in Fractional Order Control and Estimation”

Fractional calculus appears to be simultaneously a new and old research issue. The concept of fractional (or, more precisely, non integer) differentiation appeared first in a famous correspondence between the Marquise de L’Hospital and Leibnitz, in 1695. Many famous mathematicians such as Euler, Laplace, Abel, Liouville, and Riemann have further developed this area which, however, remained for centuries a purely theoretical topic, with little if any connection to practical problems of physics and engineering. In recent decades, non integer differentiation has become a more and more popular tool for modeling physical systems from diverse domains such as mechanics, electricity, chemistry, biology, economics, and many others. The long-range temporal or spatial dependence phe