Topics in Control and its Applications

Prof. Edward J. Davison (Ted) is a man of many talents. He started his career in music, veered into engineering physics for his undergraduate degree and moved to applied mathematics for his MASc degree; although accepted to do a PhD in cosmology, he ended up doing a PhD at Cambridge University in the area of systems control under the direction of the renowned Prof. Howard Rosenbrock. This breadth ofability underscores his ensuing thirty-five years of work in systems control, which spans the very applied to the highly theoretical. Equally important, he is arguably one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the area - he argued in the 1997 Bode Lecture that, unlike popular opinion, theory is lagging practise, with many exciting areas of science and engineering requiring input from the systems control area. Ted's contributions to systems control are many. His first journal paper was on the area of model reduction, which became a "citation classic". He is commonly regarded to have introduced the word "robust" to the area, and has published extensively in the area of robust control, ranging from his 1976 paper on the robust servomechanism problem to the more recent paper on computing the real stability radius. He was in on the ground floor ofthe control of large scale systems, introducing such fundamental notions as decentralized fixed modes, and posing and solving the decentralized robust servomechanism problem. He has made contributions to determining fundamental benefits and limitations of adaptive control.