IFAC Proceedings Volumes – serie

These proceedings contain the 100 papers presented at the 3rd IFAC Conference on System Structure and Control held in Nantes, France, 5-7 July 1995. The conference provided an ideal forum for automatic control researchers from around the world to present their results and exchange both ideas and experience. The aim of the conference was to report recent research on various aspects of system analysis and applications, to identify future trends in this area and to promote applications of the structural approach of control theory.

These proceedings contain the papers presented at the 5th IFAC Symposium on Automated Systems Based on Human Skill, held in Berlin, Germany, 26-28 September 1995. The symposium, like previous ones in the series, brought together researchers, developers and users of complex human-machine systems. Discussions covered manufacturing, process control, aircraft and air traffic control, and administrative processes with an emphasis on how to design such systems and integrate both developers and users into the design process. The main issues addressed, therefore, were the joint engineering of production processes, information technology and work organisation and the possibility that this may lead to the re-definition of human operators in process automation.

SAFEPROCESS '97 was the third in this major IFAC symposia series and covered a wide range of theoretical and application studies concerned with the reliability, availability and safety of controlled systems.

The goal of the symposium was to bring together experts from different fields to give an overview of the state-of-the-art, present new research results and show future developments. In addition, there was special emphasis on industrial requirements for FDI (fault detection and isolation) and a new session on the human factors aspects of system monitoring and safety that reflects the growing interest in this area.

These proceedings contain the 209 papers presented at the symposium and comprise: plenary overviews; state-of-the-art reviews and surveys; the very latest results; and tutorial papers.

Robotics, Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Artificial Intelligence were, for a long time, headlines in production automation and a lot of scientific events dealt with these three main topics.

During the last six years however, methods of Artificial Intelligence have been implemented more and more in production automation, especially in production planning, control and supervision. This has lead to new headlines about Intelligent Computer Integrated Manufacturing (ICIM) or Intellligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) which have become important for the computer-controlled factory of the future.

This third IFAC workshop on Intelligent Manufacturing Systems continued discussions and the exchange of research results that began with the previous two workshops: in Dearborn, USA in 1992 and in Vienna, Austria in 1994. It included presentations about manufacturing systems operations, manufacturing processes, manufacturing planning, concurrent engineering, object-oriented design, simulation and fault detection.

The Sixth International IFAC Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Real-Time Control was held in Slovenia in 1995 and provided a forum for leading researchers and practitioners in this field to exchange ideas and results.

This postprint volume from the workshop contains all the papers presented there and features five plenary lectures by distinguished control/artificial intelligence scientists. The approaches covered in the papers include fuzzy control, artifical neural networks, expert systems and machine learning whilst the Technical Programme highlights a vareity of methods from artifical intelligence fields applied for control problems.

The IFAC Workshop on Control Education and Technology Transfer Issues was held in Brazil in 1995 and gave academic and industrial researchers from all over the world the opportunity to discuss their experiences and research results in this field.

This postprint volume from the workshop contains all the 28 papers presented and aims to give an impression of the views of researchers, engineers, equipment manufacturers and users of technology.

The IFAC Workshop on Intelligent Components for Autonomous and Semi-Autonomous Vehicles (ICASAV '95) was held in Toulouse, France, 25-26 October 1995 and provided academic and industrial researchers from all over the world with an opportunity to discuss their experiences and research results in this field. Areas covered included vehicle dynamics, navigation, localization estimation, driver assistance and energy management.

These proceedings contain papers presented at the IFAC Symposium on Robust Control Design (ROCOND'97) held in Budapest, Hungary between 25-27 June 1997.The Symposium was sponsored by the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) and was organized by the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.It consisted of 3 plenary papers, 15 invited papers and 65 technical papers. Topics covered included design of low complexity robust controllers for uncertain systems, software tools for robust control design, robust stability, nonlinear control, performance and control applications.

The IFAC TC on Manufacturing, Modelling, Management and Control (MIM) was founded on the IFAC World Congress Sydney 1993. The goals of this workshop concerned the development, comparison and classification of formal models in the field of Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems in a descriptive as well as prescriptive way. Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems are able to integrate optimization methods, simulation models, procedures and knowledge-based tools. The target for the workshop activities were related to the specification of requirements for new models which are used in simulating and designing manufacturing management and control strategies, including discrete-event and continuous representations. Technical areas of interest, at the system level, included: tools for plant layout design, process planning, production planning and control. Technical areas of interest, at the component level, included: models for functional description of flexible manufacturing and assembly systems oriented to production activity control, process supervision and maintenance.

The IFAC Conference on Control of Industrial Systems (CIS'97) was organized by the Ecole Nationale d'Ingénieurs. It was devoted to 'Control for the Future of the Youth' and linked the control science with the control engineering in the framework of industrial systems control.

The wide diversity of topics, high quality, theoretical impact and applications of contributed results acknowledged the following:

. Control, which is mainly automatic today, is the brain of every industrial system. Industrial systems automatic control necessitates a permanent interaction between systems and control science, and control engineering. Automatics is a self-contained and complete scientific and engineering discipline on automatic control, and as such, it has been interacting with almost all other scientific, engineering and social areas. Automatic control implies new job forms and qualifications, thus representing the area of the widely growing research and professional possibilities for pacific contributions to the well-being of humanity. Automatics is one of the most perspective disciplines open to young engineers and scientists.

These two volumes contain the Proceedings of the 9th IFAC symposium on Information Control in Manufacturing which took place in Nancy and Metz, France, between 24-26 June, 1998.

This INCOM'98 program had six main themes which focused on the role of information for automating manufacturing operations; the role of information for integrating and distributing automated manufacturing activities in the whole Enterprise and; the role of information for enhancing synergies between humans and machines.

This year's symposium drew attention from more than 35 countries, and the number of the papers presented was over 200. The scientific relevance of this symposium was sponsored by three International Scientific Societies: IFAC with 6 Technical Committees, IFIP and CIRP, and two National Scientific Institutions: CNRS and INRIA. The industrial relevance of this symposium produced sponsorship by more than 10 companies who actively participated in this event.

This volume contains the proceedings of the IFAC Workshop on Singular Solutions and Perturbations in Control Systems (SSPCS-97) held at Pereslavl-Zalessky, Russia on 7-11 July 1997. The Workshop was sponsored by IFAC and organized jointly by the Russian National Committee of Automatic Control, the Program Systems Institute and the Institute for Information Transmission Problems at the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the University of Pereslavl.

The objective of this workshop was to provide an international forum for the discussion of recent developments and advances in the fields of singular control problems, impulsive control, singular perturbations technique in control systems, computational problems and others.

The Workshop was devoted both to theoretical and applicative aspects of the so-called "nonclassical" problems in the area of control theory, such as problems with singular perturbations, impulse and generalized controls. These problems arise in various areas of applications, including mechanics, information processing, medicine and economy. At the same time they stimulate the development of new mathematical tools in the classical theory of control and differential equations.

All papers included in this volume are given in the form presented by the authors.

It is increasingly accepted that future dependable, real-time digital computer control systems will have distributed architectures. Advantages of distributed computer control systems include the possibility of composing large systems out of pre-tested components with minimal integration effort, their well-defined fault containment properties and their capacity to make effective use of mass-produced silicon chips.

The IFAC Workshop series on Distributed Computer Control Systems (DCCS) focuses on design requirements and fundamental principles encountered in such systems and highlights and traces the growth of key concepts at their various stages of development. Theoretical and application-oriented viewpoints receive equal emphasis. These Workshops also provide an excellent forum for the exchange of information on recent technological advances and practices in the distributed computer control field.

The 1997 DCCS Workshop was notable for the attention given to practical implementations of ideas that have been under discussion for decades and maintained the high technical standard set by previous Workshops in the series - the policy of concentrating on a specific topic, inviting a number of key authors and of accepting only a limited number of papers paid dividends.

The 2nd IFAC Workshop "New Trends in Design of Control Systems" was organized by the Slovak Society of Cybernetics and Informatics (which is the Slovak IFAC National Member Organization) on 7-10 September 1997 and was sponsored by the IFAC Technical Committee on Control Design.The aim of this Workshop was to bring together experts in various theoretical and applied areas of Control Theory to review recent advances and to anticipate major future developments of the discipline. The Workshop attracted more than a hundred authors from which 92 presented their contributions in Smolenice.Areas covered included linear and nonlinear control system design; large scale systems and decentralized control; intelligent controllers, neural, fuzzy and genetic control design; adaptive and selftuning control; control of discrete event systems; and control design problems in robotics and manufacturing.The high professional level of the papers presented at both IFAC Workshops (held in 1994 and 1997) outlined new directions in Control Theory development and their applications in practice.

IMS'97, the fourth in the series of IFAC Workshops on Intelligent Manufacturing Systems, was held in Seoul, Korea, on July 21-23, 1997. It was sponsored by the IFAC Technical Committee on Advanced Manufacturing Technology and organized by the Engineering Research Center for Advance Control and Instrumentation at Seoul National University on behalf of the Institute of Control, Automation and Systems Engineers in Korea.

Rapid progress in the area of modern manufacturing is probably most evident through the developments in intelligent manufacturing systems. The same fast advancements have made the objective of achieving a balanced technical program a challenging task. The International Program Committee (IPC) wanted the Workshop to include the most notable and recent results, but still to reflect the versatility of maturing IMS technologies.

In the Workshop, the importance of intelligence in modern manufacturing has gained considerable recognition from engineers and researchers due to today's unforeseen manufacturing environment change. This Workshop focused on the issue "intelligent manufacturing," especially, with two intriguing keynote speeches, a special invited session on the worldwide IMS Project and two tutorial programs as well as the 64 papers from 16 countries worldwide. We do hope that this event has provided the excellent opportunity to identify the future trends as well as exchange and learn ideas and experiences in intelligent manufacturing.

Held from 3-5 September 1997 in Nantes, France, this was the fifth of the IFAC series of triennial Symposia on Robot Control. The final selection lead to 126 papers (from 200 submissions) in the Technical Program. This consisted of 33 sessions disposed in 3 parallel tracks and brought together contributions from 298 leading researchers.

The papers covered a range of topics relevant to the field of robot control, including modelling and identification, force and compliance control, robot control techniques, vision control, grasp control, flexible robots, non holonomic robotic systems, walking robots, control design and architectures, teleoperation, and underwater robots.

The Symposium featured three invited plenary speakers: Professor Steven Dubowsky, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology presented a lecture entitled 'A perspective of the advancement of robotic systems during the past 15 years'; Professor Shanakr Sastry, from the University of California, presented a lecture entitled 'Air Traffic Management Systems: at the intersection of Control Theory and Robotics'; and Professor Friedrich Pfeiffer, from the Technical University of M�nchen, presented a lecture entitled 'Robots with unilateral constraints'.

Different applications fields would benefit from automation if suitable control strategies and devices, without modifications of the whole system or the productive process, were to be introduced. This aim should be achieved by a low cost automation approach.The objective of this Symposium was to bring together end users and control systems specialists to evaluate the possibilities of techniques, design procedures, components and instruments to achieve a low cost automation. It also takes into consideration not only all the economic aspects but also the improvements in productivity, reliability, flexibility, and facility of implementation.

The IFAC International Workshop on Automation in the Steel Industry: Current Practice and Future Development (ASI'97) was held in Kyongju, Korea from 16th to 18th July 1997, with the Steel Processing Automation Research Center (SPARC) serving as the official host. The objective of the workshop was to bring together engineers and scientists with expertise in applying modern control theories and techniques to industrial problems, particularly those involved in the steel industry.

These proceedings present papers covering various processes in the steel industry, such as cold rolling, hot stripping, continuous casting, sintering, tube making and welding. New technologies with a strong potential for application to the steel industry, such as fuzzy control, AI techniques, neural networks, robust control, predictive control, and instrumentation and measurement are also covered.

Automatic machines or smart robots are interconnected with distributed knowledge bases by nation- or world wide digital networks. They are supporting human life in various places, at the same time saving energy and resources. Technology and economic development are effecting rapid changes depending on the fields, regions and culture to the way people interact with the systems, while sometimes keeping, otherwise forsaking their own traditions. Man machine systems have to create new interaction styles between human and machine intelligence, support cooperation among different organizations and enhance situation understanding for the long and short term, or remote and local activities regarding performance, safety, security and satisfaction.

The seventh IFAC/IFIP/IFORS/IEA symposium on Analysis, Design and Evaluation of Man-Machine Systems was held in Kyoto on September 16-18, 1998. At the symposium, 99 papers were presented including four plenary papers among 131 submissions.

The scope of the Workshop was Challenge to New Cyberships. When designing a marine system it is important that the cybernetic control system is seaworthy, safe, robust, intelligent and adaptive to strong sea disturbances and its changes. The Workshop was a forum for discussing the latest achievements and trends within the following fields: Marine Control Systems; Ship Manoeuvring Model; Navigation Systems; Traffic Guidance and Control Systems; Main Engine and Machinery Control Systems; Safety and Fault Control Systems; Machinery Surveillance, Condition Monitoring and Quality Control Systems; Training and Vehicle Simulation Systems.

As the 21st century nears, there is a need to seriously reconsider many aspects of modeling and controlling large, complex, man-made systems. Integration of technologies and functions requires deep interdisciplinary expertise and technical breadth for successful implementation. Large scale systems theory can play a central role in this effort and it is a strongly held belief that this approach will continue to be of major importance in the future.

This was the fifth in the successful IFAC series of meetings entitled System, Structure and Control. Previous meetings were held in Praha (1982 and 1992), Nantes (1995) and Bucharest (1997).All the invited sessions were accepted, and the final selection led to a total of 132 papers in the technical program. This consisted of 27 sessions over 3 parallel tracks for the 3 days of the conference.The presentations covered a range of topics concerning the analysis and control of systems. These included new trends in time delay systems; linear, nonlinear, time-varying and periodic systems; stability; robustness; non integer differentiation in modeling identification and control; discrete events; dynamic systems; and applications.

There exists today an increasing interest in the study of time delay systems because delayed systems are encountered frequently in practice and time delays are often a source of instability.The first workshop in this rapidly growing field of time delay systems was organized by the Laboratoire d'Automatique de Grenoble, France and sponsored by the IFAC Technical Committee on Linear Systems.The 50 participants had the possibility to attend 4 plenary sessions and 2 invited sessions as well as 30 contributed papers selected from 40 submitted papers coming from 17 countries.The technical papers, arranged in 11 sessions, covered the field of linear time delay systems, including algebraic and structural properties, stability analysis, stabilization, Hinf control, robust stabilization and some applications.

This conference which was originally planned as workshop took place on October 19 to 22, 1998 in St-Hubert, Montr�al. The idea of a conference devoted to Space Robotics matured when two IFAC Technical Committees, Aerospace Control and Robotics decided to co-sponsor such an event. The final decision converged with technological maturity of Space Robotics itself. It became obvious that robotics is a unique but viable technology that can be used in Space exploration.

Robotics is the intelligent connection of perception to action. This broad definition of robotics encompasses both science and technology. In the early days, the changing technology in manufacturing was driving the development in robotics. New manufacturing technology required new, economical and efficient methods of production. Development was geared towards robots in the form of manipulators. In later years, the development was driven by demand in service industry, military and special applications. One of those special applications is related to Space and its exploration. The rapid development in Space related technologies brought forward questions about the need for automation technologies that would allow for operations in Space in an efficient and safe way. Some Space operations could not have possibly been done without extensive use of automation and especially robotics. There are numerous robotics meetings and conferences across the world but it became obvious that the meetings addressing particular problems in space robotics would be useful and helpful.

The Program Committee tried to include in conference presentations all specific fields of robotics that are important in Space applications. On manipulators' side, kinematics, manipulation, dexterity, sensors and control systems have been covered. On mobile robots' side new control techniques, telerobotics, nonholonomic systems, and trajectory planning have been considered. Also, applications and Space operations have been reviewed.

Altogether 30 papers were selected and accepted by the International Organizing Committee. Papers were presented in 8 sessions in three days. There were also three keynote speeches presented by invited speakers and three distinguished speakers to present keynote lectures on three separate occasions. Speakers were chosen in order to give a broad overview of space robotics activities in all involved countries. Participants came from Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom and the USA.

In day 1, eight papers were presented in two sessions. Session 1 was related to Dextrous Robots and Session 2 to Mobile Robots (Part 1 and 2). Day 2 included a keynote speech on the topic of "Robotics and On-Board Autonomy: For What and How Far Can We Go?", followed by Session 3: Robot Controllers and Session 4: Vision Systems and Control. Day 3 consisted of 5 sessions, Session 5: Manipulation Control, Session 6: Kinematics, Session 7: Nonholonomic Systems, Session 8: Space Operation (Part 1 and Part 2).

Chapter headings and selected papers: Controller Design for Nonlinear Systems. Global regulation problem for nonlinear systems (S.M. Fei, C.-B. Feng). Sliding Mode Control of Nonlinear Systems. Nonlinear sliding surface design in the presence of uncertainty (A. Loukianov et al.). H-Infinity and Nonlinear Control. Control of nonlinear systems via feedback linearization and constrained model predictive control (W.-K. Son, O.K. Kwon). Optimization and Related Topics I. Optimization of boundary and starting controls in multi-dimensional hyperbolic systems (A.V. Arguchintsev). Optimization and Related Topics II. The optimal stabilization of plasma under uncertainty conditions (V.F. Gubarev, O.S. Yakovlev). Advanced Applications of Genetic Algorithms. Multidisciplinary optimization with evolutionary computing for control design (W. Khatib et al.). Linear Quadratic Optimal Control. Singular optimal control problem of linear singular systems with linear-quadratic cost (Y. Chen et al.). Control Applications of Optimization. The optimal control of processing systems by economical criteria as applied to distillation (V.P. Krivosheev, A.Y. Torgashov). Optimal Control I. Stability properties of an iterative optimal control algorithm (P.D. Roberts). Optimal Control II. Quadratic index analysis in predictive control (J.S. Senent et al.). H-Infinity Control and Game Theoretical Approach. Game problem of approach under failure of controlling devices (A.A. Chikrii). Optimal Control Design. The Yakubovich-Kalman-Popov lemma and stability analysis of dynamic output feedback systems (R. Johansson, A. Robertsson). Nonlinear Robust Control I. Robust stability of uncertain systems with differentiable nonlinearity (A. Gaiduk). Nonlinear Robust Control II. Robust nonlinear forwarding with smooth state feedback control (W.Z. Su, M. Fu). Optimal, Robust Control I. Robust reliable H∞ controllers design via LMIS (D. Hu, W.-H. Chen). Optimal, Robust Control II. A dynamic games approach to disturbance attenuation control of discrete-time descriptor systems (H. Xu). Author index. Keyword index.

This symposium was the seventh in a very successful series in this field. Since the beginning of the series, there have been a number of very positive developments in the topical area of 'Intelligent Control'. In particular, the area referred to as 'situated control' has stimulated the formation of new perspectives towards real-time intelligent systems. The performances of such artificial species as walking cockroaches, maze-negotiating mice, coke-can collecting robots and the like have encouraged the exploration of yet more adaptive control perspectives.

In this symposium, there was a strong wind of change bringing more consideration of the roles of learning, evolution, hybrid systems and so on under many diverse labels and for many different systems and circumstances.