Guest Editorial for Special Issue on Fractional Order Systems and Controls

FRACTIONAL calculus has been applied in all MAD (modeling, analysis and design) aspects of control systems engineering since Shunji Manabe’s pioneering work in early 1960s. The 2016 International Conference on Fractional Differentiation and Its Applications (ICFDA) was held in Novi Sad, Serbia, July 18-20. Quoting from the website http://www.icfda16.com/ “Fractional Calculus (FC for short) is a modern and expanding domain of mathematical analysis. The notion of fractional differentiation, or more appropriately the differentiation of arbitrary real order, means an operation analogous to standard differentiation which will take into account, memory effects if the independent variable is time, or nonlocal effects in the case of spatial independent variables. The order of the derivative may also be variable, distributed or complex. Basically, FC includes more information in the model than offered by the classical integer order calculus. Besides an essential mathematical interest, its overall goal is general improvement of the physical world models for the purpose of computer simulation, analysis, design and control in practical applications . . . ”, one has a clear impression that “fractional calculus” is “application oriented”. The conference had two interesting plenary roundtable panel discussions: