Control in an Information Rich World: Report of the Panel on Future Directions in Control, Dynamics, and Systems

Abstract

The field of control provides the principles and methods used to design engineering systems that maintain desirable performance by automatically adapting to changes in the environment. Over the last forty years the field has seen huge advances, leveraging technology improvements in sensing and computation with breakthroughs in the underlying principles and mathematics. Control systems now play critical roles in many fields, including manufacturing, electronics, communications, transportation, computers and networks, and many military systems. As we begin the 21st Century, the opportunities to apply control principles and methods are exploding. Computation, communication and sensing are becoming increasingly inexpensive and ubiquitous, with more and more devices including embedded processors, sensors, and networking hardware. This will make possible the development of machines with a degree of intelligence and reactivity that will influence nearly every aspect of life on this planet, including not just the products available, but the very environment in which we live. New developments in this increasingly information rich world will require a significant expansion of the basic tool sets of control. The complexity of the control ideas involved in the operation of the Internet, semi-autonomous command and control systems, and enterprise-wide supply chain management, for example, are on the boundary of what can be done with available methods. Future applications in aerospace and transportation, information and networks, robotics and intelligent machines, biology and medicine, and materials and processing will create systems that are well beyond our current levels of complexity, and new research is required to enable such developments. The purpose of this report is to spell out some of the prospects for control in the current and future technological environment, to describe the role the field will play in military, commercial, and scientific applications over the next decade, and to recommend actions required to enable new breakthroughs in engineering and technology through application of control research.

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