Under which circumstances are variational principles based on entropy production rate useful tools for modeling steady states of electric (gas) discharge systems far from equilibrium? It is first shown how various different approaches, as Steenbeck’s minimum voltage and Prigogine’s minimum entropy production rate principles are related to the maximum entropy production rate principle (MEPP). Se...

Despite providing robustness, high-gain observers impose a peaking phenomenon, which may cause instability, on the system states. In this paper, an adaptive saturation is proposed to attenuate the undesirable mentioned phenomenon in high-gain observers. A real-valued and differentiable sigmoid function is considered as the saturating element whose parameters (height and slope) are adaptively tu...

We return to the geometry optimization problem of Lennard-Jones clusters to analyze the performance dependence of “cut and splice” genetic algorithms (GAs) on the employed population size. We generally find that admixing twinning mutation moves leads to an improved robustness of the algorithm efficiency with respect to this a priori unknown technical parameter. The resulting very stable perform...

Timed game automata are used for solving control problems on real-time systems. A timed reachability game consists in finding a strategy for the controller for the system, modeled as a timed automaton. Such a controller says when and which of some "controllable" actions should be taken in order to reach "goal" states. We deal with a parametric version of timed game automata. We define parametri...

Exact solutions of the Schrödinger equation are obtained for the Rosen-Morse and Scarf potentials with the position-dependent effective mass by appliying a general point canonical transformation. The general form of the point canonical transformation is introduced by using a free parameter. Two different forms of mass distributions are used. A set of the energy eigenvalues of the bound states a...