This book is intended for researchers, teachers, and students willing to explore conceptual bridges between the fields of Automatic Control and Power Electronics. The need to bring the two disciplines closer has been felt, for many years, both by Power Electronics pecialists and by Automatic Control theorists, as a means of fruitful interaction between the two scientific communities. There have, certainly, been many steps given in that direction in the last decade as evidenced by the number of research articles in journals, special sessions in conferences, and summer courses throughout the world.
This book hopes to become a small but positive contribution in the needed proximity of the two engineering fields. Automatic Control specialists are,
generally speaking, not fully aware of the limitations, fundamental needs and nature of the technical problems in Power Electronics design. On the other
hand, Power Electronics specialists are seldom Automatic Control theorists themselves, nor are they convinced of the advantageous viewpoint hidden in
the, often rather complex, mathematical developments of Automatic Control theory. The net result has been a misunderstanding of the value of each others field with little interaction and a diminished chance for cross-fertilization of ideas, methods, visions and solutions.