Publisher's Synopsis
The concept of CAST, computer aided systems Theory, was introduced by F. Pichler of Linz in the late 1980s to include those computer theoretical and practical developments used as tools to solve problems in system science. It was considered as the third component (the other two being CAD and CAM) that would provide for a complete picture of the path from computer and systems sciences to practical developments in science and engineering. The University of Linz organized the first CAST workshop in April 1988, which demonstrated the acceptance of the concepts by the scientific and technical community. Next, the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria joined the University of Linz to organize the first international meeting on CAST (Las Palmas February 1989), under the name EUROCAST 1989, a very successful gathering of systems theorists, computer scientists and engineers from most European countries, North America and Japan. It was agreed that EUROCAST international conferences would be organized every two years. Thus, the following EUROCAST meetings took place in Krems (1991), Las Palmas (1993), Innsbruck (1995), Las Palmas (1997), Vienna (1999), Las Palmas (2001) and Las Palmas (2003) in addition to an extra-European CAST conference in Ottawa in 1994. Selected papers from those meetings were published as Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science vols. 410, 585, 763, 1030, 1333, 1728, 2178 and 2809 and in several special issues of Cybernetics and Systems: an lnternational Journal.
