IFAC Newsletter
IFAC Newsletter
International Federation of Automatic Control |
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Newsletter |
All his friends and colleagues in IFAC will miss him dearly.
The Workshop on Real Time Programming provides an opportunity to assess the state of the art, to present new results, and to discuss possible lines of future development. Its primary focus is on software development for real time systems and real time operating systems. The IFAC/IFIP Workshop on Real Time Programming has a tradition of more than 30 years, and is now conducted annually. As a truly international event, it is held in different parts of the world. This year the meeting was held in Lyon (France). It was organised by the Laboratoire d’Ingénierie de l’Informatique Industrielle (L3i) from the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon. The workshop was financially supported by the Ville de Lyon, the Conseil Général du Rhône and the Région Rhône-Alpes.
The number
of participants was almost in line with the original goal envisaged (42, twice
the number of presented papers).
The electronic submission of papers (full versions and not extended abstracts) was encouraged in order to facilitate and to the speed up the work of the International Programme Committee. The reviewing process was also done, in most cases by e-mail and allowed to reduce the time delay. Finally, most contributions of the accepted papers, in their camera ready version, were also submitted by electronic mail, in PostScript.
The authors of accepted papers received an author kit, directly provided by IFAC, to format their papers. The regular proceedings are going to be published by Elsevier Ltd as usual, including the synthesis of the two forums and the abstracts of the keynote speeches.
The contributions came from Europe, North- and South America. From the 35 submissions, 31 came from universities and 4 from Research Centres.
Each paper
was reviewed by at least four referees (in most cases, there were five reviewers),
who gave marks. The highest scoring 21 papers were selected for acceptance
and assigned to presentation in seven different sessions. Of these 21 papers
accepted for publication, 20 were from universities, and 1 from a research
agency. The geographic distribution reads as follows:
This year, a particular accent was on object-oriented research in the field of real time programming. Thus, the program was shaped in such a way that two sessions on Object-Oriented Approaches were placed the second day. At the closing of this day, a forum, organised as an intentionally challenging/controversial discussion, was devoted to the Object Oriented Real Time Systems. After short statements by the panellists, an outstanding discussion took place among all the participants in the workshop. A second forum devoted to real time education took place the third day and was organised in the same manner and with the same aim: to obtain an outstanding discussion among all the participants in the workshop. This feature of introducing two forums was quite successful.
Numerous
discussions took place in each of seven sessions, two forums, and during the
breaks (the coffee breaks twice a day, and the 2-hour lunch break). In addition,
the Workshop devoted ample time for focused discussions by inviting two Keynote
Speakers, from the Industry World, to give talks on interesting topics:
WRTP’97
Editor IPC Chairman
Through the wonderful efforts of these people, in soliciting, generating and reviewing papers, there is no doubt that we have succeeded. This success has been especially notable in a climate in which the publishing industry is facing serious new challenges.
These first six years, however, have just seen the start of CEP, and much still remains to be done. In the light of both past successes and the many and varied future challenges, the Editorial Board of CEP has undertaken an intense review of where we are going, and how we are going to get there. The questions to be answered include:
The first step in this process has come with the introduction of typeset copy from the first issue of 1998; we believe that CEP’s growing status as an archival journal merits the best presentation possible! Working from authors’ disks, Elsevier will relieve authors of the burden of final formatting and presentation. Final language editing can now be done after the technical content has been accepted, speeding up the initial review process even further. Additionally, the journal is now being included in Elsevier’s Electronic Warehouse.
Secondly, tight, centralised control has been necessary during the formative years, but the sheer volume of work is increasingly rendering this impossible. We envisage a gradual move to a more distributed structure, making fuller use of the skills and insights of our knowledgeable and experienced panel of editors. As part of this process, I had originally intended to stand aside as Editor-in-Chief at the Beijing Congress in 1999. However, this step has been accelerated by changes in my own career, which preclude me from involvement in outside publishing activities.
Naturally, I leave CEP with very mixed feelings. I was very honoured at being asked to undertake this pioneering task, and am delighted with what we have accomplished. I am extremely appreciative of the efforts of all our Editors, Associate Editors, and Reviewers. The help and guidance given by our publishers, especially through Michael Dawes, has been a constant source of support, and the amazing feats achieved by Maureen Morris and her helpers at IFAC Publications have been more than we could ever have expected. The team in Swansea has been superb, and the wonderful editorial and organisational work of my wife Sue, assisted by Joy Knight, has set a standard that will be difficult to follow.
But it is time for me to move on. I know that we have in place a superb and experienced team of Editors, Associate Editors and Reviewers, who will take the journal from strength to strength. Most of all, though, I am delighted that my friend and professional colleague, George Irwin, has agreed to take over as Editor-in-Chief. George and I have worked closely over the past years for CEP, as exemplified by his appointment last year in the role of Deputy Editor-in-Chief. We have also been involved together in other IFAC groups, as well as in local UK-based learned society activities. George enjoys an enviable international reputation for his practical, industrially relevant leading-edge research in control engineering, and I can think of few persons to whom I would be more happy to hand over the reins. As from 1st January 1998, therefore, all correspondence related to CEP should be addressed to:
Current research interests, much of which is in collaboration with industry, include identification and control using neural networks, fuzzy neural systems and local model networks, with applications in the aerospace, chemical and electric power fields. He has over 200 publications, including 6 edited research books. Prizes awarded for journal papers include four IEE Premiums (1985, 1987, 1991, 1996) and the 1995 Honeywell Prize from the UK Institute of Measurement and Control (1995). He is a member of the Control & Instrumentation College of the UK Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council.
Prof. Irwin is the current chair of the new IEE Control division and chairs the Northern Ireland Centre of the IEE. He is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the IEE, a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Institute of Measurement and Control.
In addition
to being Editor-in-Chief of Control Engineering Practice, Prof. Irwin serves
on the International Editorial Board of the IEE Proceedings on Control Theory
and Applications and has wide experience on the programme and organising committees
of international conferences. He is active in two IFAC Technical Committees,
‘Algorithms and Architectures for Real-time Control’ and ‘Fuzzy and Neural
Systems’ and is an executive committee member of the UK Automatic Control
Council.
The control problems raised require new techniques and formulations, in addition to the traditional ones familiar to control theorists. Communication networks are large complex entities which support many agents and have to handle demands with a wide range of quality of service (QoS) requirements. Together with the commercial nature of the offered services, this complexity brings to the fore problems of a game theoretic nature among the interacting agents, problems of how to price the services, of how to decide when to admit connections, and more generally how to provide and meet QoS guarantees through routing, congestion control, and flow control. The infrastructure of the network needs to be properly designed, and requires the investigation of the tradeoff between hardware cost and performance in switches and routers, the development of efficient scheduling algorithms, and the design of adaptive control methods that use appropriate distributed measurements of the current state of the network. Multiple access problems need to be solved for both wired and wireless systems.
The purpose
of this special issue of Automatica is to bring together research and/or tutorial
papers addressing the general theme of ‘Control Methods for Communication
Networks’. Subject areas of interest include:
All submitted papers will be subject to peer review as any other Automatica paper.
The timetable for the special issue is as follows:
Prospective authors are invited to submit seven (7) copies of their paper, prepared as per regular Automatica guidelines to
V. Anantharam/J.
Walrand
EECS Department
231 Cory Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
Phone: +1(510)643-8435 (VA), +1(510)642-1529 (JW)
Fax: +1(510)642-2739 (VA)
email: ananth@vyasa.eecs.berkeley.edu (VA), wlr@eclair.eecs.berkeley.edu (JW)
Elsevier Science has decided to convert its previous title Annual Reviews in Automatic Programming to Annual Reviews in Control.
Under the new title, this publication will contain a broad range of review articles, covering all aspects of the theory and application of control. The majority of these articles will be drawn from the most recent symposia, conferences and workshops of IFAC, the International Federation of Automatic Control. IFAC is a broad-based international professional organization arranging about 30 technical meetings each year. Those meetings cover every aspect of automatic control and feature review papers written by the most outstanding experts of the particular field. We feel that we are providing a useful service to the scientific community, and produce a valuable publication, by printing a selection of those review papers. In addition, we plan to invite experts to write review papers, directly for the journal, on subjects not sufficiently represented in the conference materials.
Converting to the new arrangements has caused some delay in the publication of the 1996 and 1997 volumes. From 1998 on, there will be one issue each year, appearing in May.
Janos Gertler, Editor
Fairfax, VA USA