Guest Editorial 225..227

We are witnessing a global financial and economic crisis, which may have far-reaching, and at least recently, unforeseeable consequences on the future and development of world science and technology. Control theory has always been an area of science driven by technology. From the statistical filtering solution formulated by R. Kalman in the early 1960s, devised for answering the needs of NASA's space exploration projects, to the robustifying approaches of control and filtering relying on the H-infinity theory, stimulated by the various aircraft control problems in the 1980s, the symbiotic development of theory and practice has always been assessable. The first discernible effects of the crisis can be captured in the visible shift towards the rapid restructuring and accentuation of priorities among the fields of sciences. Traditional sciences may get new forms and establish new partnerships, some of them will rise and some of them descend. What is clearly seen today in all areas of control is the accession of the significance of the principles, such as distribution and cooperation, negotiation-based and consensus-seeking solutions, the dependence on shared resources, moreover, the wide-spreading use of the underlying technologies upon which these principles may rely, such as communication and networking. Novel methods of control, getting stuck in these principles, seem to be promising in the treatment of the ever-increasing problem of complexity, for more efficient recon-figuration, better adaptation and optimality in the control of (large-scale) dynamical systems. Applications of systems and control theory and advanced control technology that are increasingly visible beyond the traditional control-driven domains, such as aerospace and process industries, include road vehicle and traffic automation systems, ad-hoc networks and bio-molecular systems and the various micro-and nano-applications mostly related to robotics. This theme is well reflected in the articles we have selected for the edition of the Special Issue that contains the plenary and semiplenary papers and selected papers from the regular and tutorial pro-The articles cover the subject fields from classical approaches of control to the latest streams of control theory by summarizing the most recent advances in this area. The Volume consists of the following articles: The works, presented by P. Colaneri and Z. Szabo´, consider special themes related to the con-trollability and weak stabilizability of switching dynamic systems. While Colaneri's article presents an interesting view on the available results concerning dwell time analysis for switched linear systems, both in deterministic and stochastic settings where the switching operation affects …