State variableA state variable is one of the set of variables that are used to describe the mathematical "state" of a dynamical system. Intuitively, the state of a system describes enough about the system to determine its future behaviour in the absence of any external forces affecting the system. Models that consist of coupled first-order differential equations are said to be in state-variable form. In mechanical systems, the position coordinates and velocities of mechanical parts are typical state variables; knowing these, it is possible to determine the future state of the objects in the system.
State-space representationIn control engineering, model based fault detection and system identification a state-space representation is a mathematical model of a physical system specified as a set of input, output and variables related by first-order (not involving second derivatives) differential equations or difference equations. Such variables, called state variables, evolve over time in a way that depends on the values they have at any given instant and on the externally imposed values of input variables.
Global variableIn computer programming, a global variable is a variable with global scope, meaning that it is visible (hence accessible) throughout the program, unless shadowed. The set of all global variables is known as the global environment or global state. In compiled languages, global variables are generally static variables, whose extent (lifetime) is the entire runtime of the program, though in interpreted languages (including command-line interpreters), global variables are generally dynamically allocated when declared, since they are not known ahead of time.
State space (computer science)In computer science, a state space is a discrete space representing the set of all possible configurations of a "system". It is a useful abstraction for reasoning about the behavior of a given system and is widely used in the fields of artificial intelligence and game theory. For instance, the toy problem Vacuum World has a discrete finite state space in which there are a limited set of configurations that the vacuum and dirt can be in. A "counter" system, where states are the natural numbers starting at 1 and are incremented over time has an infinite discrete state space.
Local variableIn computer science, a local variable is a variable that is given local scope. A local variable reference in the function or block in which it is declared overrides the same variable name in the larger scope. In programming languages with only two levels of visibility, local variables are contrasted with global variables. On the other hand, many ALGOL-derived languages allow any number of nested levels of visibility, with private variables, functions, constants and types hidden within them, either by nested blocks or nested functions.
