Annual and Biannual

» C O N F E R E N C E R E P O R T S

2006 AmericanControl Conference

T he 2006 American Control Con-ference (ACC) was held 14–16June 2006 at the Minneapolis

Hilton in Minneapolis, Minnesota.This year the conference celebrated itssilver anniversary. Since 1981, theACC has been held under the aus-pices of the American Automatic Con-trol Council (AACC) and the U.S.National Member Organization of theInternational Federation of AutomaticControl (IFAC). The ACC bringstogether individuals working in con-trol, automation, and related areasfrom the American Institute of Aero-nautics and Astronautics (AIAA), theAmerican Institute of Chemical Engi-neers (AIChE), the Association forIron and Steel Technology (AIST), theAmerican Society of Civil Engineers(ASCE), the American Society ofMechanical Engineers (ASME), theInstitute of Electrical and ElectronicsEngineers (IEEE), the InternationalSociety for Measurement and Control(ISA), and the Society for ComputerSimulation (SCS).

The venue for this conference pro-vided an environment that was con-ducive for interaction among theattendees as well as enjoyment of thelocal attractions and rich culture.The weather was cooperative, withthe exception of a severe stormbefore and during the closing recep-

tion but which failed to dampen theenthusiasm of the attendees. I thinkit is fair to say we all had a greattime! The success of this conferencecan be attributed to the attendees,authors, presenters, and chairs, all ofwhom made the conference comealive. The logistics in bringing the

In this issue of IEEE Control Systems

Magazine, we have two conference

reports, ACC 2006 and WODES’06, both

held last summer.

IEEE Control Systems Magazine

seeks reports on control-related confer-

ences worldwide. Please contact me if

you wish to submit a report on a recent

conference. Please keep in mind that a

conference report is the best way to

alert potential attendees to the next

conference in a series.

Zongli Lin

Karlene Hoo, 2006 ACC program chair.

2006 ACC awardees and past and current AACC officers. Standing (from left): WilliamS. Levine (past president), B. Wayne Bequette (vice president), Murat Arcak, Nuno Mar-tins, Munther Dahleh, Tamas Keviczky. Sitting (from left): Masayoshi Tomizuka, TamerBasar, Gary Balas, David Bayard, Galip Ulsoy (president).

Eduardo Misawa, general chair of 2006 ACCand his son, Erik, a mechanical engineeringstudent at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and future ACC attendee.

82 IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE » FEBRUARY 2007

event together were masterfully han-dled by the able and enthusiasticoperating committee. The conferenceteam devoted 3 years to planning andthen executed the plan flawlessly.

TECHNICAL PROGRAMThe technical program was coordinat-ed by Program Chair Karlene Hoo aswell as vice chairs Michael J. Piovoso,Mark Balas, and Wendy Foslien. Muchpraise is due to the reviewers andassociate editors for their hard work incompleting the reviews. The 2006ACC program was based on excellentmaterial submitted by authors world-wide, including 1,444 contributedpapers, 171 invited papers, and 32invited session proposals. The finalmanuscript acceptance rate was 61%for contributed papers and 81% forinvited papers. There were 175 techni-cal sessions distributed over the 3days of the conference in 20 parallelsessions, which included one interac-tive and three tutorials sessions. Therealso were five special sessions andfour industrial special sessions.

Three plenary talks were given;namely, Shankar Sastry of the Univer-sity of California–Berkeley spoke on“Networked Embedded Systems: Sen-sor Nets and Beyond,” John Bay ofAFRL gave a talk titled “Modeling theWorld: How to Make Control theDominant Discipline in Tomorrow’sApplications,” and Pablo Parrilo of

MIT and 2005 Eckman awardee spokeon the “Sum of Squares Methods inOptimization and Control.”

The five special sessions were:Industrial Academic Interaction, Publi-cation; The Public University and thePublic Interest, Biological Control Sys-tems; Endogenous and ExogenousAnalysis and Design; a panel discus-sion on Process Control and SCADASecurity; and Early Career Develop-ment: Role of NSF, NASA, AFOSR,AACC. Four of the sponsors, Honey-well, United Technologies ResearchCenter, Raytheon, and The MathWorksheld industrial special sessions as well.

The proceedings of the confer-ence, which was designed and

assembled by Publications ChairMay-Win Thein, are available onCD-ROM. Program information wastransferred from PaperPlaza, whichwas managed by Pradeep Misra andThomas Parisini.

TUTORIALSThe industry and applications tutori-als were held on Wednesday andorganized by the Industry and Appli-cations Vice Chair Wendy Foslien.The tutorials focused on appliedresearch and covered a broad set oftopics and industries. The three tutori-als presented this year were: LabViewGraphical Programming for Field Pro-grammable Gate Arrays; Convex

ACC 2006 Operating CommitteeGeneral Chair: Eduardo Misawa, Oklahoma State University

Program Chair: Karlene A. Hoo, Texas Tech University

Vice Chair for Special Sessions: Michael J. Piovoso, Penn State University

Vice Chair for Invited Sessions: Mark Balas, University of Wyoming

Vice Chair for Industry & Applications: Wendy Foslien, Honeywell

Vice Chair for Student Affairs: Prabhakar Pagilla, Oklahoma State University

Exhibits Chair: Michael R. Moan, Raytheon

Finance Chair: Oscar R. Gonzalez, Old Dominion University

Local Arrangements Chair: Gary Balas, University of Minnesota

Publications Chair: May-Win Thein, University of New Hampshire

Publicity Chair: Richard T. O’Brien, Jr., United States Naval Academy

Registration Chair: John M. Watkins, Wichita State University

Workshops Chair: Daniel Abramovitch, Agilent Labs

Photos courtesy of Pradeep Misra, Balint Vanek, Rohit Pandita, and Erik Misawa.

Anu Annaswamy, general chair for the 2008 ACC, and Pradeep Misra, secretary of theAACC and general chair for the 2006 CDC.

IFAC President Wook H. Kwon and 2006IEEE CSS President John Baillieul.

FEBRUARY 2007 « IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 83

Optimization Part II: Duality, Algo-rithms and More Applications; andOscillation Diagnosis in ControlLoops–Stiction and Other Causes.

EXHIBITSExhibits Chair Michael R. Moan is tobe congratulated for putting togethera diversified program consisting of 16exhibitors. The exhibitors were wellintegrated with the other events of theconference by their location in thefoyer area in front of the ballrooms,meeting rooms, and conference regis-tration desk. This setting allowed foreffortless contact and animated inter-action among the conference atten-dees and exhibitors.

WORKSHOPSThe preconference workshops held onMonday and Tuesday before the mainconference technical program wereorganized by Workshops ChairDaniel Abramovitch. Eight work-shops occurred, including two 2-dayworkshops and six 1-day workshops.

Thanks to the initiative of Karlene andDanny, the conference offered Contin-uing Education Units through theIEEE for all of the workshops. Theworkshops were: Recent Advances inSubspace System Identification;Robust and Adaptive Control; Controlof Fuel Cells; Modeling and Analysisof Biological Regulatory Networks;Dynamic Inversion Tutorial—Theoryand Example Applications; Coordina-tion and Control of UAVs for UrbanOperations; Real-Time Optimizationby Extremum Seeking Control; andStochastic Search and Optimization.

LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS AND SOCIAL EVENTSOne of the highlights of the confer-ence was the social program. LocalArrangements Chair Gary Balas puttogether a series of events that includ-ed a Speaker’s Breakfast every morn-ing as well as coffee breaks twiceeach day for three days. The tradi-tional Awards Luncheon was held onThursday and was attended by arecord number of participants. Thespecial event on Thursday eveningwas at the Minnesota Historical Cen-ter, which allowed the attendees toappreciate the rich history of Min-nesota. The attendees of this eventwere also treated to a raffle of books,software, and hardware donated bythe exhibitors. The Closing Receptionwas held at the Nicollet Island Pavil-ion, located on an island in the Mis-sissippi River with an excellent viewof downtown Minneapolis. Unfortu-nately, a rare severe storm rolled intoMinneapolis a few hours before theevent and forced the event to moveindoors. However, it did not preventthe attendees from having a livelytime talking with friends and col-leagues, with a wonderful jazz bandplaying in the background.

AWARDSThe American Automatic ControlCouncil (AACC) awards were pre-sented at the Awards Luncheon. Theawards presented and the recipientswere as follows:

Elmer Gilbert of the University of Michiganand Chong Jin Ong of the National Universi-ty of Singapore.

Eduardo Misawa and plenary speakerPablo Parrilo.

Erlisa Jorganxhi of Quanser Consulting withQuanser’s haptic writing machine.

Anna Stephanopoulou of the University ofMichigan and daughter Katerina.

The official National Instruments LEGO robot.

84 IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE » FEBRUARY 2007

» Donald P. Eckman Award: Mu-rat Arcak, for outstanding con-tributions to feedback design ofnonlinear systems and net-works, and innovative applica-tions to fuel-cell technology.

» Control Engineering PracticeAward: David Bayard, for fun-damental and innovative contri-butions to spacecraft controlsystems, including technicalleadership on the precisionpointing system for the SpitzerSpace Telescope.

» John R. Ragazzini Award:Masayoshi Tomizuka, for out-standing contributions to con-trol education by blending andbalancing a range of theoreticaldevelopments with applica-tions, mentoring many futureleaders in academia and indus-try, and demonstrating leader-ship in many national andinternational organizations.

» O. Hugo Schuck Award for The-ory: Paper WeA03.3 (at 2005ACC), titled “FundamentalLimitations of Performance inthe Presence of Finite CapacityFeedback,” by N.C. Martins andM.A. Dahleh.

» O. Hugo Schuck Award for Prac-tice: Paper FrA04.3 (at 2005ACC), titled “Flight Test of aReceding Horizon Controller forAutonomous UAV Guidance,”by T. Keviczky and G.J. Balas.

» Richard E. Bellman Control Her-itage Award: Tamer Basar, forfundamental developments inand applications of dynamicgames, multiple-person deci-sion making, large scale systemsanalysis, and robust control.

The Richard E. Bellman ControlHeritage Award is the highest honorawarded by the AACC. The award isnamed after Richard Ernest Bellman,the creator of dynamic program-ming, whose work has shaped ourfield and influenced, through his cre-ative ideas and voluminous multi-faceted work, the research of tens ofthousands not only in control but

also in other fields and disciplines.In his acceptance speech, Dr. Basarthanked the AACC for selecting himfor this most prestigious award andfor the recognition by the AACC. Heindicated that in his own research,which has encompassed control,games, and decisions, he has beeninfluenced by the work of Bellman aswell as the work of Rufus Isaacs (thecreator of differential games), whosetenure at RAND Corporation partial-ly overlapped with that of Bellmanin the 1950s. His speech continuedwith a reflection on those early daysof control and game theory research,as well as Bellman’s role in thatdevelopment. He also described theresearch and funding environmentduring that period, and how thoseactivities gave birth to modern con-trol theory. The full text of ProfessorBasar’s speech can be accessedthough the AACC Web site atwww.a2c2.org/awards/bellman.

CONFERENCE ATTENDEESRegistration Chair John M. Watkinsmanaged the registration process andthe registration desk during the con-ference. He and his team were keptbusy given that 1,151 registrantsattended the ACC. ACC is a trulyinternational conference as shown byparticipation from 38 countries,including the United States (705),Canada (64), China (41), France (40),Japan (39), United Kingdom (27),Italy (25), Netherlands (21), Germany(16), Taiwan (16), Australia (15),Mexico (15), South Korea (14), India(12), Sweden (12), Norway (11),Brazil (10), Switzerland (10), Singa-pore (9), Spain (8), Turkey (7), Hun-gary (6), as well as 34 participantsfrom 16 additional countries.

Among the attendees, 273 werestudents, an increasingly importantcrowd of young participants in thisconference. The Vice Chair for Stu-dent Affairs Prabhakar Pagilla man-aged the activities devoted to thestudents. One of the activities is thefinancial travel support that theconference provides to students

with funds provided by the AACC,NSF, IEEE, ASME, as well as indus-trial sponsors. Their generous sup-port al lowed the conference tofinance the travel of 86 students.Another important activity for thestudents is the Best Student PaperCompetition. This year’s winnerwas Anurag Ganguli for the paper“Distributed Deployment of Asyn-chronous Guards in Art Galleries.”The other finalists, all strong con-tenders, were Andrey Smyshlyaev,Shivakumar Kameswaran, NaderMotee, and Bert Pluymers.

Carlo Novara of the Politecnico di Torino.

Jacob Apkarian of Quanser Consulting andKaren Rudie of Queen’s University.

FEBRUARY 2007 « IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 85

The 8th International Workshop on Discrete Event Systems (WODES’06)

T he 8th International Workshopon Discrete Event Systems(WODES’06) took place on the

campus of the University of Michiganin Ann Arbor on 10–12 July 2006.After an initial meeting in Amherst,Massachusetts, in 1991, the WODESseries officially began in 1992 inPrague. WODES conferences havebeen held every other year under thesupervision of the WODES SteeringCommittee. Previous workshops wereheld in Sophia-Antipolis (1994),Edinburgh (1996), Cagliari (1998),Ghent (2000), Zaragoza (2002), andReims (2004). WODES’06 was attendedby 109 participants from 19 countries

The WODES program includedthree invited lectures, 69 contributedpapers selected from 94 submissionsby the 45-member Scientific ProgramCommittee, and 15 invited papers onsoftware tools. The invited plenarytalks were: “Partial Order Techniquesfor Distributed Discrete Event Sys-tems” by Albert Benveniste of INRIA;“Event-based Stochastic Learning andOptimization” by Xi-Ren Cao ofHKUST; and “Analyzing SecurityProtocols Using Probabilistic I/OAutomata” by Nancy Lynch of MIT.The slides from these talks are avail-

able on the conference Web site(www.eecs.umich.edu/wodes2006).

The conference papers covered top-ics ranging from supervisory control tofault diagnosis, logic control, modularand decentralized control, and sched-

uling and optimization for untimed,timed, and stochastic models of dis-crete-event systems. Several modelingformalisms were employed, fromautomata to Petri nets, process andmax-plus algebras, and classes of tran-sition systems. A few papers also con-sidered hybrid systems. The papers onsoftware tools for modeling, analysis,verification, control, and simulation ofdiscrete-event systems were presented

Publicity Chair Richard T. O’BrienJr. reached both regular and newattendees through excellent promo-tion. The number of conference atten-dees indicates that the ACC is one ofthe leading conferences for the con-trol community.

FINANCEThe success of the conference was alsofinancial. A net surplus will be distrib-uted back to the AACC member soci-eties based on the number of papersand attendees from each society. Theconference finances were handled by

Finance Chair Oscar R. Gonzalez, whomade sure that we stayed within bud-get by tracking all financial matterseach night of the conference. At thetime of this writing, he is working dili-gently to close the books and have theaudit conducted.

A PERSONAL NOTEAs general chair of ACC 2006, I wouldlike to express my thanks to all of theauthors, session chairs, members ofthe program committee, innumerableanonymous reviewers, PaperPlazasupport team, student helpers, and

members of the operating committeewho made this conference a tremen-dous success. As most attendeesknow, the ACC operates 100% by vol-unteers who generously provide theirtime and effort to make the confer-ence run smoothly. The merit of con-ference success is all yours! Last butnot least, I would like to recognize oursignificant others, families, andfriends, who also sacrificed when we,the volunteers, were working on con-ference matters and were absent fromtheir lives.

Eduardo Misawa

Peter Caines reads remarks from MurrayWonham about the early days of the Ra-madge-Wonham supervisory control theory.

Christos Cassandras reads remarks fromYu-Chi Ho about the evolution of discrete-event systems from guidance and controlthrough manufacturing automation.

86 IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE » FEBRUARY 2007

in two interactive sessions with postersand live software demonstrations. Theproceedings are available on IEEEXplore. A special issue of the Journal ofDiscrete Event Dynamic Systems: Theoryand Applications will include expandedversions of five WODES’06 con-tributed papers. This issue is sched-uled for publication in late 2007.

A lunchtime panel on “DES Prob-lems in Industry” included remarksby Yi-Liang Chen of Rockwell Scientif-ic, Darren Cofer of Honeywell, andEelco Scholte of United TechnologiesResearch Center. The panel membersdiscussed various applications, includ-ing underwater autonomous vehicles,fire security, fault tolerance, and com-munication systems. The panel uni-formly agreed that system verification,in which the system includes hard-

ware and software as well as discreteand continuous dynamics, is challeng-ing in any domain. Issues in embed-ded systems were a unifying theme ofthe lively discussions.

The control community began con-sidering new research directions in dis-crete event systems approximately 25years ago, under the leadership of Yu-Chi Ho of Harvard University andMurray Wonham of the University ofToronto. Although these researcherswere unable to attend WODES’06, theycontributed some remarks about thehistory of the field of discrete-eventsystems and its future. These remarks,which were read at the conference ban-quet by Christos Cassandras on behalfof Y.-C. Ho and by Peter Caines onbehalf of M. Wonham, are posted onthe conference Web site.

WODES’06 was technicallycosponsored by the IEEE CSS andfinancially supported by the Univer-sity of Michigan, Wayne State Uni-versity, the U.S. National ScienceFoundation (NSF), the NSF Engineer-ing Research Center for Reconfig-urable Manufacturing Systems at theUniversity of Michigan, and theSoutheastern Michigan Section ofIEEE. Corporate sponsorship wasgenerously provided by Honeywell,HP Labs, Rockwell Scientific, andUnited Technologies Research Center.

Mark your calendars for the 9thedition of WODES, to be held inGothenberg, Sweden, in 2008.

Stéphane Lafortune, Feng Lin, and Dawn Tilbury

FEBRUARY 2007 « IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 87

Darren Cofer (left) explains the challenges in system verification. Yi-Lian Chen (center) listens to a question about the relative importance ofsynthesis and verification. Eelco Scholte (right) considers a question about tradeoffs involving formal verification, simulation, and testing.

Dubious Knockouts

Perhaps the most overrated weapon of the war was the Patriot ground-to-air missile which was, at thetime, hailed as a great killer of Iraqi Scud, ground-to-ground missiles. Within months the Israelis

revealed that in each of the encounters they had been able to film, the Patriots had failed to stop theScud warhead. Israeli experts were said to doubt that any Scuds aimed at their country had beenknocked out by Patriots. The claimed 90 per cent success rate in Saudi Arabia was equally dubious. Inthe most tragic case, a known software bug introduced a timing error into Patriot operations which,when multiplied through many hours of use, amounted to a blind spot through which Scuds could passunchallenged. One did, killing twenty-eight American soldiers in their barracks. In addition to theBritish and other troops lost to ‘friendly fire’ (the result, presumably, of communications failures), thesefatalities made it clear that even ‘smart’ weapons could do dumb things.

—C. Pursell, White Heat: People and Technology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994, pp. 160–161.