Welcome Message from the Chair
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. A researcher in the automotive control area finds his interest in the diversity and complexity of the subsystems which make up a car. 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 is, of course, the key to electrification as it will be for future progress and too.
The Symposium Advances in Automotive Control (AAC) is one of these milestones: seven successful meeting have been held in Ascona, Columbus, Karlsruhe, Salerno, Monterey, Munich, Tokyo, Linköping, Orleans, Columbus, and the last one in Eindhoven.
In addition to AAC, the Technical Committee supports the IFAC workshop E-CoSM (originally Engine Control, Simulation and Modeling). While E-CoSM historically had a stronger focus on engine-related topics, it has evolved and today covers a scope largely aligned with AAC, broadly addressing automotive control, modeling, and simulation. Both AAC and E-CoSM are organized on a triennial basis and interlace with the IFAC World Congress, thereby providing the automotive control community with an IFAC meeting opportunity every year.
At the same time, we 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, and join our group “Automotive Control” on Facebook: your comments and suggestions are always welcome.
Yours sincerely,
Lars Eriksson
