Introduction to System Sensitivity Theory

The author stresses that this book is written at a basic introductory level: accordingly, the book neither contains a rigorous treatment of the covered theory, nor is the covered theory chosen at a level other than the fundamental concepts of sensitivity theory. It is the reviewer's opinion that the author has accomplished his aims: thus he has written an introductory textbook on sensitivity theory which both covers the fundamentals of the theory and provides a guided entry to more advanced theory and to research. Indeed, it is the reviewer's personal experience [2] that the existence of this textbook, enfolding a unified set of definitions and a unified set of terminologies, can both facilitate subsequent research in sensitivity and enable it to be conducted in a smoother less disjointed way than in the past. Relative to the importance of sensitivity theory, it is to be recalled that in system identification, and therefore in the control domain, there exists