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Welcome to the web pages of the IFAC Technical Committee 7.1 on "Automotive Control".

For more than a century, the motor vehicle has become a symbol of freedom and quite often it remains a dream. It has been improved again and again with the passing years, but with the increasing traffic, is still a risk element. Moreover, the fossil fuels depletion, the increased oil price and the need of reducing carbon dioxide emissions dramatically conflict with an increasing demand of mobility, posing new and complex challenges to the automotive community.

The target of the technical committee on automotive control is to improve this means of transport. The researcher finds his interest in the diversity and complexity of the subsystems which make up a car. The driver must keep the highest place in the hierarchy of the interaction between man and machine. The opposite would be frustrating and the interest of the car itself would be lost. The group welcomes and favours all discussions and emerging ideas by allowing research teams from all over the world to meet regularly and take stock of their advances in research.

The integration of mechanical engineering with electronics, with the decisive contribution of control science and engineering, is the key to explain the spectacular advances made by motor vehicles in the last decades, concerning emissions, fuel consumption, safety, diagnostics and comfort, and will, of course, be the key to future progress too.

The Symposium for the Advances in Automotive Control is one of these milestones; following Ascona, Columbus, Karlsruhe, Salerno and Monterey, the 6th symposium will be held in Germany in 2010. At the same time, we will co-sponsor meetings in the related fields whose advances prove interesting to us (Intelligent Autonomous Vehicle, Safeprocess, Mechatronics, Non Linear Control etc..) and diffuse other events relating to Automotive Control by means of our Newsletter.

Please visit our web pages: your comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Yours sincerely

Gianfranco Rizzo

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The previous version of the IFAC TC website can be found at the address:

http://www.ifac-automotivecontrol.org