43rd International Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE CDC 2004)

Automation and Remote Control, Vol. 66, No. 8, 2005, pp. 1357–1361. Translated from Avtomatika i Telemekhanika, No. 8, 2005, pp. 184–189. c 2005 by Fradkov. Original Russian Text Copyright

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43rd International Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE CDC 2004) A. L. Fradkov Institute of Problems of Mechanical Engineering, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia Received February 8, 2005

Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) conducted every year by the Control Systems Society (CSS) of the International Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is the oldest major conference on automatic control. It dates back to the First Symposium on Adaptive Processes held in 1962 in USA. Its popularity is explained by its high scientific level, quick publication of reports (three month after the last revision), and it is traditionally held in December, as a rule, at sites with warm climate. In the opinion of the Past and Present Chairmen of the Society [1], CDC is a historical rendezvous for the members of the Control Systems Society. where they can meet and know about latest advances, and where the sessions of the Council of Directors are held. It is here the Bode lectures are read, prizes are awarded, and Fellows of the Society are elected. The 43rd CDC was held in December 14–17, 2004 at the Atlantis Hotel, Nassau (The Bahamas) and sponsored by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Japanese Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE), and European Control Association (EUCA). C. Cassandros (Boston University) and W. Gong (Massachusetts University) chaired the Organizing and Program Committees, respectively. The program included 936 sectional reports carefully chosen from a total 1879 submitted reports, i.e., less than 50% of submitted reports were approved. Russia was represented by G. Kurin (Voronezh Forestry Engineering Academy), D. Efimov (Institute of Mechanical Engineering, St. Petersburg) and I. The Russian delegation was sponsored by the Control Systems Society. The Conference was held in honor of the 50th CSS Anniversary to trace the development of the Society and Conferences on Decision and Control, as well as to review the state-of-the-art in control as a whole. Without going into details, I would like to outline my impression on the conference, which, in my opinion, may be of interest to the readers. First I would like to say a few words as to how reports are selected. Selection is rather strict and based on reviews of full texts of reports. Therefore reports are of high level, probably, higher than that of IFAC World Congress, for which about 65–70% of submitted reports are approved (though the number of reports at the IFAC Congress is usually greater). Reports are reviewed by the Conference Editorial Board consisting of more than 100 expert editors from different countries appointed by the Council of Directors of the Society for several years. Editors work on honorary basis and are independent of the Program Committee. Every report is assigned a set of key words in accordance with the theme of the paper for the editor. The editor forwards the reports to few reviewers and submits an approval or a rejection recommendation to the Program Committee on the basis of the reviews from at least two independent reviewers. Since the conference is held annually, there is less than ten months between the last date of submission of reports (March 1) and date of commencement of the conference, and about five months for reviewing c 2005 Pleiades Publishing, Inc. 0005-1179/05/6608-1357

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and compilation of program. Such a time-pressed stringent program preparation schedule with high scientific level is aided by the automatic Internet system PaperPlaza (www.paperplaza.net) developed by the well-known Danish expert and Professor H. Kwakernaak. The PaperPlaza offers every editor, reviewer, and author a “virtual office,” which aids —editors in appointing reviewers, sending stereotype electronic letters, and viewing reviews, —reviewers in downloading texts of reports and uploading reviews via the Internet, and —authors in submitting reports, reading reviewers’ remarks and approval or rejection decision, and submitting the final version revised in conformity with reviewers’ remarks. Most of international journals and many conferences presently use similar systems. In certain conferences, the Editorial Board also acts as the Program Committee. In Russia, such a system was first used in the International Conference on “Physics and Control 2003” held in St. Petersburg (www.physcon.ru). The Conference on Decision and Control is esteemed for the reason that its proceedings are automatically published in the Electronic Library IEEExplore (www.ieee.org), which now contains more than a million papers from the IEEE journals and conference proceedings since 1988, and in many cases even earlier (for example, full texts of papers from IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control since its foundation in 1956). This library is a unique source of information on many fields of science and technology for the facilities it offers for retrieval by key words, instant access from any point of the Earth, and presence of papers not only from journals, but also from the proceedings of major conferences. This explains why many foreign universities and scientific organizations regularly subscribe to the electronic library IEEExplore. The advent of an era of electronic publication has opened unexpected opportunities: when uploaded to the database, a paper “looses” its identity as a part of a journal or conference, but acquires a status as an independent unit of scientific information. A good report from a conference proceedings becomes as accessible and interesting as any other journal article and, therefore, might be cited as often as an article from any prominent journal; it may exercise no less influence on the development of science. In view of the difficulties encountered by Russian authors in publishing their papers in prominent foreign journals [2], what matters is to make efforts to include their papers in IEEExplore when conferences are held under the auspices of IEEE in Russia. This may pave an effective path for propagating the works of Russian scientists; this path is real as demonstrated by the conferences held in St. Petersburg. Let us examine the scientific program of the conference. Four plenary sessions and 160 sectional meetings were conducted in four days. Moreover, thirteen sectional meetings were conducted in parallel. It is apparently not possible to give full coverage to the huge amount of ideas and trends. Nevertheless, some idea on the main trends can be gained from a glimpse at the statistics of key words defining the titles of meetings. The dominating trends were Networks, Agents, Cooperative (24); Application (16), Identification, Estimation, Filtering (13); Nonlinear (13); Hybrid, Switching (12); and Optimization (12). Amazingly (as observed often in discussions and in lobbies), there was an explosive interest in control for different types networks, such as communication networks, sensor networks, and cooperatives of mutually interacting systems (agents, robots, satellites), power systems, control systems for air and automobile traffic, etc. In the last few years, there has been a perceptible change in the dynamics of different trends. The table above shows the dynamics of certain key words encountered in the scientific programs of CDC 1994, CDC 2000, and CDC 2004. Clearly, this surge of interest has slightly lowered the weight of traditional fields of activity of the nineties, viz., robust, nonlinear, adaptive, and discrete systems. In applied fields, there has been a noticeable growth of interest in aerospace, biological, and transport systems.

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Table CDC 1994, CDC 2000, 144 Meetings 160 Meetings (Orlando, USA) (Sydney, Australia) Networks, Agents, Cooperative 5 6 3 15 Applications 14 19 Identification, Estimation, Filtering 20 29 Nonlinear 1 7 Hybrid, Switching 11 7 Optimal, Optimization 10 5 Distributed, Delay 10 7 Stochastic 16 8 Robust 10 4 Adaptive 7 3 Discrete Event Systems 3 2 Aerospace − − Vehicle 4 3 Process Control, Manufacturing 3 2 Mechanical 6 4 Robot 1 4 Fault, Diagnosis − 2 Biomedical 2 1 Automotive Key words

CDC 2004, 160 Meetings (Nassau, The Bahamas) 24 16 13 13 12 12 10 6 4 4 3 7 5 4 3 3 3 3 1

The main trends were touched upon in the plenary panel discussion “Challenges and Opportunities for the Future of Control,” which aroused the general interest. Opening the discussion, J. Doyle (Californian Institute of Technology) delineated the prospective development trends for the near future, viz., —control of physical processes, —biological, medical, and ecological systems; —technological networks, and —integration of control, computer science, communication, and networking. H. Mabuchi, N. Leonard, P. Kumar, C. Cassandros, and others merely expanded the ideas of these trends. Surprisingly, what was said here is in full agreement with the findings of the Commission on Future Development Trends in Systems and Control Theories, which was commissioned in 2000–2002 by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research and US National Science Foundation and headed by R. Murray (Californian Institute of Technology) and included leading specialists of world eminence [3]. The Commission recommended to promote research on integration of control, computer science, communications and networking. In the last few years, considerable advances have been made on controllability and stabilizability conditions and design of systems under information constraints on sensors, controllers and servos [4, 5]. Application of control methods in physics has also been recently attracting added interest [6, 7] to find new breakthroughs in nano-, femto-, and bio-technologies, in molecular and quantum computers, etc. J. Doyle dealt with this topic in his plenary lecture, opening the CDC 2001 [8]. By tradition, one plenary report was read on each of four days. The scientific program of CDC 2004 was opened by T. Buchman, Professor of Medicine, University of Washington (St. Lewis) with his report “Control Theories in Critical Illness and Critical Care” (by critical, he meant the state in which a patient needs external help such as artificial heart, lungs, liver, or life-sustaining drugs) to support life activities. Using an example on control of sugar content in blood, he illustrated the application of three theoretical approaches: homeostasis, networking, and allostasis. AUTOMATION AND REMOTE CONTROL

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J. Grizzle (University of Michigan) in his plenary lecture “Walking and Running in Bipedal Robots: Control Theory and Experiments” outlined theoretical and experimental works on control of bipedal robots, creation of different gaits, and organization of complicated robot movements, profusely illustrating with graphs and videos. Since 1989, CDC invites some eminent scholar to read a Henrick Bode plenary lecture, which at the CDC’04 was read by T. Basar (University of Illinois), a prominent expert on game theory and optimal control, with his report “Games, Decision, and Control: Fifty Years Back and Fifty Years Forward.” In his historic review, he noted that vital results in game theory (R. Issacs) had appeared either concurrently with or even slightly earlier than similar results in optimal control (L.S. Pontryagin, R. Bellman). The part devoted to the past 50 years lasted for less than five minutes and mostly reiterated the need for integration of control, computer science, and information theory sounded at the plenary discussion. He opined that this might turn a new page in cybernetics. Thematic discussions were devoted to “Problems of Hybrid Modeling and Their Solutions,” “Interaction of Universities and Industry,” “Integration of Graphic Programming with Graphic Projection and Modeling of Control Systems”, and a special session on “Women in Control.” There were many interesting reports at sectional meetings. Unfortunately, space restricts me from listing them all here. By speciality, my attention was drawn by new results on control based on passivity and dissipativity, control by second-order moving modes, input-output stability and stabilization, and control for distributed-parameter systems. Special mention deserves the report “A Synchronization Mechanism for Pulse Streams and the Synchronization of Traveling Waves” containing elegant results on the spectra of periodic Jacobi matrices by R. Brockett (Harvard University), who laid the foundation for certain presently flourishing scientific fields. He has shown that a periodic chain of nonlinear oscillators, the so-called “Toda chain” is capable of generating waves of soliton-type pulses, resembling waves of nervous activity. He believes that such models can be used to study the activity of nerve cells. A pleasant event in CDC is the IEEE and CSS Awards ceremony. The most honorable among them is the IEEE Control Systems Award created in 1982. Twenty two eminent scholars H. Rosenbrook (UK), K. ˚ Astr¨om (Sweden), J. Zeims (Canada), R. Brockett (USA), P. Kokotovic (USA), B. Andersen (Australia), Y. Willems (Holland), and Russian Scientists V.A. Yakubovich (1996) and N.N. Krasovskii (2003) were honored with this medal. A complete list of laureates can be viewed at www.ieeecss.org/awards. In 2004, it was award to J. Doyle (Californian Institute of Technology) “for his fundamental contribution to analysis and control of uncertain systems.” A. Winston, the IEEE President, presented the award. Other awards include G. Akselby Prize (the first editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control) for the best publication of the year, a prize for the best applied work published in IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, a prize for the best under- or post-graduate work presented at the CDC, and many others. A ceremony is held to greet new IEEE Fellows nominated by the Control Systems Society. In 2004, thirty five, including myself, were elected as IEEE Fellows. This year technical support was organized on a different basis. Every hall had an overhead MM projector, but no computer. Certain participants were disappointed at the absence of computers, though were timely notified to take a notebook along with him. What pleased every one was the free wireless Internet access within the conference center at the hotel (at other places of the hotel, it costed 10 US dollars per day). It was strange to look at people, sitting and standing in different postures in corridors, vacantly pinning their gaze at notebook LCDs. Maybe, such scenes will be a routine matter in future conferences and notebook will be an inevitable tag for every participant. The next conference on decision and control will be held on December 6–9, 2005 in Sevile (Spain) jointly with the European Control Conference (Joint 44th CDC-ECC 2005). For details, visit at www.ieeecss.org. AUTOMATION AND REMOTE CONTROL

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Such forums undoubtedly have a strong bearing on the development of science, maintenance of scientific schools, and encouragement of young scientists. I hope that Russia would revive its traditions and CDC-type Russian conferences, like the past all-union control conferences, would be renewed to offer young and old a platform for debates. But they must be organized on a modern level with regard for the present conditions and technologies. Possibly, a democratic organization has to be created for uniting and attracting the new generation of specialists. REFERENCES 1. Schrader, C.B. and Spong, M.W., The IEEE Conference on Decision and Control: Tracing CDC History, IEEE Control Syst. Magazine, Dec. 2004, pp. 56–66. 2. Fradkov, A.L., How to Write a Good Article and Reject a Bad One, Avtom. Telemekh., 2003, no. 10, pp. 149–157. 3. Murray, R., Astrom, K., Boyd, S., Brockett, R., and Stein, G., Control in an Information Rich World, IEEE Control Syst. Magazine, Apr. 2003, pp. 20–33 (www.cds.caltech.edu/~murray/cdspanel). 4. Nair, G.N. and Evans, R.J., Exponential Stabilisability of Finite-Dimensional Linear Systems with Limited Data Rates, Automatica, 2003, vol. 39, pp. 585–593. 5. Matveev, A.S. and Savkin, A.V., An Analogue of Shannon Information Theory for Networked Control Systems, Proc. 43rd IEEE Conf. Decision and Control , 2004, pp. 4485–4496. 6. Fradkov, A.L., Investigation of Physical Systems by Feedback, Avtom. Telemekh., 1999, no. 3, pp. 213–230. 7. Upravlenie molekulyarnymi i kvantovymi sistemami. Sb. perevodov (Control for Molecular and Quantum Systems. Selected Translations), Fradkov, A.L. and Yakuboskii, O.A, Eds., Moscow: Inst. Komp. Issl., 2003. 8. Doyle, J., A New Physics? 40th IEEE Conf. Decision and Control, Plenary Lecture, 2001.

This paper was recommended for publication by B.T. Polyak, a member of the Editorial Board

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