TC 2.4. Optimal Control

Welcome Message from the Chair

You are welcome to the website of the Technical Committee 2.4 on Optimal Control of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). The optimal control theory is one of the most important parts of the automatic control theory. Many outstanding results in optimal control had been obtained in the last century. One can mention names of L.S.Pontryagin, the author of the Maximum Principle, and R.Bellman, the author of the Dynamic Programming Method.

Optimal control theory, a modern extension of calculus of variations, is a mathematical optimization method for deriving control policies. It is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics, that deals with the behavior of dynamical systems.