Optimal control as a source of intelligent behaviour

The paper´s principle aim is to demonstrate, via selected application examples from the areas of traffic networks, water systems, and autonomous mobile robots, the potential of optimal control approaches in making intelligent real-time decisions. A generic optimal control problem, the corresponding necessary conditions of optimality, and a numerical solution algorithm are presented first. The application areas are briefly described and the corresponding optimal results are shown to reflect a problem-specific but designer-independent intelligent behaviour