Graham C. GoodwinRichard H. MiddletonH. Vincent Poor
An attempt is made to organize and survey recent work, and to present it in a unified and accessible form. The need for a new approach suitable for high-speed processing is discussed in the context of several applications in control and communications, and a historical perspective of the use of difference operators in numerical analysis is presented. The general systems calculus, based on divided-different operators is introduced to unify the continuous-time and discrete-time systems theories. This calculus is then used as a framework to treat the three problems of system state estimation; system identification and time-series modeling; and control system design. Realization aspects of algorithms based on the difference operator representation, including such issues as coefficient rounding and implementation with standard hardware, are also discussed.< >