Stochastic optimal control and filtering theory have been at the fore front of modern control theory and communication engineering. Filtering theory has played a significant role in space explorations, navigation, aerospace, radar, satellite, and meteorological applications.

In recent years and with advances in mathematical finance, hybrid, multiagent, discrete-event, adaptive, and network-controlled systems, stochastic control theory has maintained a central and significant role and remains a vital research field in modern control theory. This is primarily because of the fact that deterministic systems are to a large extent an abstraction, and all practical systems do have a certain degree of random and uncertain behavior in the form of noise, disturbance, and random failures. Moreover, due to this element of randomness, stochastic systems are more complicated than deterministic systems.

Therefore, a satisfactory resolution of many new, challenging, and complicated problems arising in the above areas, other engineering fields and scientific phenomenon, and involving modeling, identification, estimation, analysis, and synthesis, requires more advanced tools and rigorous investigations than hitherto available.

Thus, it is in the light of the above considerations that this call for papers on this special issue is made. More specifically, the focus will be on stochastic systems modeled in the Ito form and systems with multiplicative noise, with application to control, communication, signal processing, manufacturing and fault detection. But other classes of systems and applications will also be considered depending on the availability of space. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Stochastic modeling, stability, and stabilization
• Stochastic robust and optimal control
• Stochastic filtering and estimation
• Stochastic adaptive control
• Control of high-order stochastic nonlinear systems
• Small-gain approach to control of stochastic nonlinear systems
• Applications of stochastic control theory to manufacturing systems, fault detection, networked control systems, and so forth

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable: