This volume presents eighteen articles containing original scientific developments. Each article corresponds to a lecture presented at the meeting. These articles have all been refereed. The variety of subjects, domains of application, questions treated and methods employed is quite remarkable. We would like to thank the authors for the high quality of their contributions. We also thank the referees for their very helpful reports and comments.
The organization of the meeting and the publication of this volume were made possible by the help and contributions of several institutions and companies. We would like to particularly thank the Conseil Scientifique du CIRM, the University of Versailles St Quentin, DRET, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of National Education, Research and Technology, as well as Dassault Aviation.
We wish to express our gratitude to the staff and administration of CIRM for their help and kindness and the quality of their work. We would like to extend our special thanks to Marie-France Thai who was very efficient in the preparation of this meeting but was unfortunately unable to attend it. Mr Gemmerle had the hard task of preparing this electronic volume and did his best to put all articles in a common format. We want him to know how much we appreciate his work. Finally, we want to express our thanks to all attendees of the meeting, who made it pleasant and, we hope, useful.
The editors