coll. - CONTROL ENGINEERING.

Frigyes Cski

(19211977)

The Advanced Textbooks in Control and Signal Processing series is designed as a vehicle for the systematic textbook presentation of both fundamental and innovative topics in the control and signal processing disciplines. It is hoped that prospective authors will welcome the opportunity to publish a more rounded and structured presentation of some of the newer emerging control and signal processing technologies in this textbook series. However, it is useful to note that there will always be a place in the series for contemporary presentations of foundational material in these important engineering areas.

It is currently quite a challenge to compose and write a new introductory textbook for control courses. One issue is that the electrical engineering discipline has grown and evolved immeasurably over the years. It now encompasses the fields of power systems technology, telecommunications, signal processing, electronics, optoelectronic and control systems engineering all served with a smattering of computer science. The undergraduates and postgraduates are faced with the unenviable task of selecting which subjects to study from this smorgasbord of topics.

Many academic institutions have introduced a modular semester structure to their engineering courses. This has the advantage of allowing undergraduates and postgraduates to study a set of basic modules from each of the disciplines before specializing through a selection of advanced subject modules. This means the student obtains a good foundational grounding in the electrical engineering discipline. Such an approach requires an introductory control course textbook of sufficient depth to be useful but not so advanced as to leave students bewildered given that the subject of control has a substantial mathematical content.

Other institutions have managed to retain an Automatic Control Department or Group where the main course is a first degree in control engineering per se. Such departments are also likely to offer master and Ph.D. postgraduate qualifications in the control discipline too. In these departments, the requirements of control systems theory for mathematics can be met by specific control mathematics course modules. An introductory control engineering textbook in this context can have considerably more analytical depth too.

There is one more consideration to add into this discussion of introductory control systems engineering course textbooks. The spectrum of control involves systems theory, systems modeling, control theory, control design techniques, system identification methods, system simulation and validation, controller implementation techniques, control hardware, sensors, actuators, and system instrumentation. Quite how much of each area to include in an introductory control course is something usually decided by the course lecturer, the institutional resources available, the academic level of the course, and the time available for the student to study control. But these issues will also have a considerable influence on the type, level, and structure of any introductory course textbook that is proposed.

Lszl Keviczky, Ruth Bars, Jen Hetthssy, Csilla Bnysz form a team of control academics who have worked in various Hungarian higher educational institutions, primarily the Department of Automation and Applied Informatics at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary, and latterly with the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Science. Their introductory control course textbook presented here has evolved and been refined through many years of teaching practice. The textbook focuses on the control and systems theory, control design techniques, system simulation and validation part of the control curriculum and is supported by a substantial volume of MATLAB exercises (ISBN 978-981-10-8320-4).