Dear Colleagues,

Fractional calculus is a powerful tool for understanding the complex world. The significance of fractional calculus has been demonstrated to be very effective in various phenomena, such as viscoelastic materials, diffusion processes, long-range interactions, etc. It turns out that fractional calculus provides many helpful features that offer interesting solutions to system modeling and control, optimization algorithm design, and machine learning.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to present a collection of articles showing novel developments and results based on the framework of fractional calculus. This Special Issue especially welcomes extended papers presented at the conference “The 2021 Symposium on Fractional Derivatives and Their Applications (FDTA2021)”. We are cordially inviting you to join us at the conference and also to submit your manuscript to this Special Issue. Topics to be covered in this Special Issue include but are not limited to the following:

• Mathematical modeling of fractional and/or stochastic fractional dynamic systems in the real world, stability analysis, and numerical techniques for these equations;
• Fractional controller design and system identification;
• Fractional order models and their experimental verifications, and applications of fractional models to engineering systems in general and mechatronic embedded systems in particular;
• Fractional calculus-based models for cyberphysical systems (CPS) and cyber-human systems (CHS) and, in general, intelligent adaptive systems (IAS);
• Applied fractional calculus in big data analytics and variability quantification;
• Applied fractional calculus in machine learning for more optimal ways of optimization;
• Fractional calculus-based better characterization of complex systems in general.

Both papers with novel theoretical approaches and papers that advance theoretical contributions with meaningful applications are invited.

Prof. Dr. YangQuan Chen
Prof. Dr. Yongguang Yu
Dr. Da-Yan Liu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Fractal and Fractional is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Mathematical modeling of fractional dynamic systems and their control
• Fractional controller design and system identification
• Stability analysis of fractional dynamic systems
• Fractional order models and their experimental verifications
• Applied fractional calculus in big data analytics
• Applied fractional calculus in machine learning