IEEE Transactions Automatic Control

Recent Special Issues

Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 54, no. 5, May 2009

Positive Polynomials in Control
Guest Editors: Graziano Chesi, Didier Henrion

Positive polynomials are at the heart of many methods used in control systems. This special issue contributes by exploring the extent to which positive polynomials are currently exploited and can be further exploited in control systems, overviewing relevant application areas, and identifying their potential and their limitations in both theoretical and practical uses.
Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 53, no. 1, January 2008

Joint Special Issue on Systems Biology
Guest Editors: Mustafa Khammash, M. Vidyasagar, Claire Tomlin

Systems biology can be defined as the study of organisms, or parts of an organism, viewed as an interconnection of various subsystems serving a variety of biological functions. A biological system can be studied at several levels of complexity and aggregation, such as genes, proteins, pathways, and cells. Central to the study of systems biology is the notion of dynamics, one of the characteristics that distinguishes it from computational biology. This joint special issue consists of papers that cover fundamental concepts and issues in systems biology, including analysis of biological networks, dynamics of signaling and regulatory networks, dynamic modeling and identification of biological networks, and modeling, design, and construction of biological circuits.
Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 51, no. 6, June 2006

Symbolic Methods for Complex Control Systems
Guest Editors: Magnus Egerstedt, Emilio Frazzoli, George J. Pappas

This special issue targets a better understanding and design of continuous signal to finite symbol mappings for control purposes. These include abstracting continuous dynamics to symbolic control descriptions, instruction selection and coding in finite-bandwidth control applications, and applying formal language theory to the continuous systems domain.
Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 50, no. 10, October 2005

System Identification
Guest Editors: Lennart Ljung, Antonio Vicino
The topic of System Identification has been a surprisingly vivid and resilient research area in the control community over many years. Thirteen years after the publication of a 1992 special issue edited by Robert Kosut, Graham Goodwin and Mike Polis, this new special issue gives a broad perspective of the state of the art on the subject of system identification of linear as well as non-linear models.
Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 49, no. 9, September 2004

Networked Control Systems
Guest Editors: Panos Antsaklis, John Baillieul

This special issue deals with systems comprised of actuators, sensors, and controllers whose operation is coordinated through some form of communication network. The system elements are typically spatially isolated from one another, operating in an asynchronous manner and communicating over a wide area via both wired and wireless links. The topics covered in the issue include studying the relationship between closed loop stability and communications constraints on the feedback channels, ad hoc network formation and mobility, consensus problems for networks of dynamic agents with fixed and switching topologies, and information flow and stability of distributed control in autonomous vehicle formations.

Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 49, no. 3, March 2004

Stochastic Control Methods in Financial Engineering
Guest Editors: Mark Davis, Robert Elliott, Bozenna Pasik-Duncan
This special issue presents recent advances in the Mathematics of Finance and related new problems in stochastic systems and control theory. Topics covered include the study of arbitrage, hedging, pricing, consumption/investment optimization, incomplete and/or constrained markets, equilibrium, differential information, and the term-structure of interest rates.
Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 48, no. 10, October 2003

New Directions in Nonlinear Control
Guest Editors: Wei Lin, John Baillieul, and Anthony Bloch

This special issue offers a broad perspective of the present state-of-the-art in nonlinear feedback design and an up-to-date account of the most recent advances and progress in the field of nonlinear control. Contributed papers point out new, challenging and promising research directions, where many outstanding issues remain unsolved.


Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 48, no. 8, August 2003

Performance Limitations and Design Tradeoffs in Feedback Control
Guest Editors: Jie Chen and Rick Middleton

This special issue addresses issues and results brought up by recent developments in nonlinear or time varying systems, more complex control architectures than unity feedback, and research on performance limitations, advanced by new problem and application areas and by developments in novel design techniques and methods.

Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 47, no. 6, June 2002

Systems and Control Methods for Communication Networks
Guest Editors: Tamer Basar and Weibo Gong

This special issue provides a coherent and focused outlet for research on the topic of systems and control methods for communication networks, including models, congestion control and management for the efficient operation of high speed network, queueing disciplines to guarantee quality of service and to provide differentiated services, and control related issues inherent to wireless networks.

Upcoming Special Issues

Call for Papers

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL

Special Issue

Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), in their various shapes and forms, have greatly facilitated and enhanced the automated, remote, and intelligent monitoring of a large variety of physical systems. These networks consist of a large number of typically small devices, each incorporating sensing, processing, and wireless communications capabilities. Their use has penetrated a plethora of application domains from industrial and building automation, to environmental, wildlife, and health monitoring.

The control and systems community has played an important role in the maturing of WSNs addressing issues related to their fundamental limits and designing strategies to optimize and control their operation so as to improve performance. Performance encompasses a variety of metrics that may vary with the application but in all cases includes the network's energy use which determines its usable lifetime. As WSN nodes are powered by small batteries, energy conservation has become a very important concern. Equally importantly, the existence of WSNs has provided a major application context to theoretical contributions of the control community including cooperative and distributed control, event-based monitoring, discrete-event systems, and consensus algorithms.

What is emerging as the next step in the WSN evolution is their use not only in monitoring but also in controlling a physical system. To that end, some of the WSN nodes have to be augmented by integrating actuators. Actuators can be simple devices programmed to take immediate, one-shot, action in response to sensory input, or they can be more sophisticated entities (like robots) that interact with their environment in more complex ways. The resulting augmented version of WSNs is commonly referred to as Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs). WSANs are therefore heterogeneous networks that comprise of networked sensor and actuator nodes that communicate among each other using wireless links to perform distributed sensing and actuation tasks.

WSANs can be used to close loops over the network in a variety of applications, such as, environmental control, event detection and suppression, home automation, manufacturing, microclimate control, surveillance etc. The control community has recently made important contributions in understanding control over communication channels but this work has, for the most part, abstracted the communication medium. A new challenge is to consider a WSAN as the communications channel over which we seek to close control loops.

The topics relevant to this special issue include but are not limited to:

< Autonomous sensor networks
< Co-design of communication protocols and control strategies
< Architectural, modeling and simulation of WSANs
< Autonomic and self-organizing coordination and communication
< Sensor-actuator and actuator-actuator coordination
< Distributed control in sensor-actuator networks
< Biologically inspired communication in WSANs
< Applications and prototypes.

Submission Details:

All papers submitted to the special issue will be subject to peer review in accordance with the established practices of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. Papers that do not fall within the scope of the special issue will be returned to the authors without review, to enable them to submit them as regular papers through the normal channels.

Authors are invited to submit their manuscripts to either one of the guest editors. The manuscript format should follow the guidelines posted at the website: http://css.paperplaza.net/journals/tac/. Hardcopy submissions will not be accepted.

Important dates:

Paper submission: DEADLINE: February 1, 2010;
Acceptance: August 2010;
Tentative Publication: May 2011.

Guest Editors:

Jiming Chen
Department of Control Science and Engineering
Zhejiang University
Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.
E-mail: jmchen@iipc.zju.edu.cn

Karl H. Johansson
ACCESS Linnaeus Center
School of Electrical Engineering
Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Email: kallej@kth.se

Stephan Olariu
Department of Computer Science
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, VA 23529-0162, U.S.A.
Email: olariu@cs.odu.edu

Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering,
and Division of Systems Engineering
Boston University, USA
Email: yannisp@bu.edu

Ivan Stojmenovic
School of Information Technology and Engineering
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada;
Email: ivan@site.uottawa.ca

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