TC 4.1. Components and Technologies for Control

Welcome Message from the Chair

Welcome to the homepage of IFAC Technical Committee 4.1 on Components and Technologies for Control. If you are a researcher or a practitioner and your interests include the design, analysis and evaluation of components (sensors, actuators and instruments) and embedded systems for control, measurements and sensing applications, then this technical committee is for you.

Intelligent components play a crucial role in the automation as limits imposed by actuators and/or sensors have a direct impact on the best attainable control quality. Also, intelligent components can provide substantial support in the automation of large and complex systems by features such as e.g. automatic commissioning.

Intelligent components will allow reliable measurement and actuation and are characterized by the following features:

• Embedded Component Profile: Intelligent components will include a profile that describes their characteristics as e.g. manufacturer, part number, actuation or measurement range, operation limits, etc.
• Auto-Configuration: Intelligent components can automatically commission themselves for operation
• Diagnosis and self-diagnosis: Intelligent components can supervise themselves and are tightly integrated into a plant wide asset management system. Actuators will automatically raise an alarm if they cannot carry out the requested actuation task
• Remaining lifetime prediction: Each component can give inform about its expected remaining lifetime and thus aid in condition-based maintenance
• Multi-sensor systems: All sensors mounted at the plant will automatically integrate themselves into a plant-wide multi-sensor system allowing to provide  data fusion and provide additional virtual instruments
• Sensor signal consolidation: Sensors will not only provide the sensor reading, but will also supply a confidence measure for the current measurement. Thy will provide consolidated measurements or aid in consolidating measurements on a plant-wide automatic control system  
• Microsystems: nano- and micro-technologies can serve as a demonstrators for what can be accomplished by integrated information processing capabilities at the component level and can be seen as a nucleus for intelligent components.

Such solutions can only be provided by sharing expertise with other Technical Committees and bringing together experts from the different fields of automatic control under the roof of the International Federation of Automatic Control. Hence, we encourage practitioners from the various fields and domains to join the activities of our Technical Committee. We organize sessions at the IFAC World Congress and other IFAC events.

I am looking forward to meeting you at these events or at our official meetings.

Best regards

Marco Münchhof

Chair Technical Committee 4.1 - Components and Technologies for Control