A principal objective of control engineering is to design control systems which are robust with
respect to external disturbances and modelling uncertainty. This objective may be well achieved
using the sliding mode technique - which is the main subject of this monograph. More precisely
Time-Varying Sliding Modes for Second and Third Order Systems focuses on only one but very
important aspect of the sliding mode system design i.e. the problem of the sliding plane
selection. In this self-contained monograph the main notions and concepts used in the field of
variable structure systems and sliding mode control are presented before in the main part the
issue of the switching surface design is discussed. This is done by considering two standard
plants which are very often encountered in the control engineering practice: the second and
the third order nonlinear and possibly time-varying systems.
