This work is a revised and enlarged edition of a book with the same title published in Romanian by the Publishing House of the Romanian Academy in 1989. It grew out of lecture notes for a graduate course given by the author at the University if Ia~i and was initially intended for students and readers primarily interested in applications of optimal control of ordinary differential equations. In this vision the book had to contain an elementary description of the Pontryagin maximum principle and a large number of examples and applications from various fields of science. The evolution of control science in the last decades has shown that its meth­ ods and tools are drawn from a large spectrum of mathematical results which go beyond the classical theory of ordinary differential equations and real analy­ ses. Mathematical areas such as functional analysis, topology, partial differential equations and infinite dimensional dynamical systems, geometry, played and will continue to play an increasing role in the development of the control sciences. On the other hand, control problems is a rich source of deep mathematical problems. Any presentation of control theory which for the sake of accessibility ignores these facts is incomplete and unable to attain its goals.

Water supply- and drainage systems and mixed water channel systems are networks whose high dynamic is determined and/or affected by consumer habits on drinking water on the one hand and by climate conditions, in particular rainfall, on the other hand. According to their size, water networks consist of hundreds or thousands of system elements. Moreover, different types of decisions (continuous and discrete) have to be taken in the water management.

Special tools are required for examining and solving optimization problems. The main tools in the study of local optimization are classical calculus and its modern generalizions which form nonsmooth analysis. The gradient and various kinds of generalized derivatives allow us to ac­ complish a local approximation of a given function in a neighbourhood of a given point. This kind of approximation is very useful in the study of local extrema.

This book presents a novel unified treatment of inverse problems in optimal control and noncooperative dynamic game theory. It provides readers with fundamental tools for the development of practical algorithms to solve inverse problems in control, robotics, biology, and economics.

As any human activity needs goals, mathematical research needs problems -David Hilbert Mechanics is the paradise of mathematical sciences -Leonardo da Vinci Mechanics and mathematics have been complementary partners since Newton's time and the history of science shows much evidence of the ben­ eficial influence of these disciplines on each other.