A survey of international views on a first course in systems and control for engineering undergraduates

Abstract

This paper summarises the results of an international survey of academics and industrialists on what should be prioritised in the first, and often only, control course taken by engineering undergraduates. The results are made up both of quantitative data whereby respondents selected from a number of options, and also of qualitative data where respondents entered free comments. Reflections on the results and summaries of common trends are given to help readers consider how the curriculum in their own institutions might be updated and modified to meet modern requirements. At the time of writing the survey had around 500 respondents covering a good spread of nationalities, employment status and engineering disciplines.

Technical Committee on Control Education: A First Course in Systems and Control Engineering [Technical Activities]

“…The results from the control curriculum survey [1] support the argument for more project-based learning in control education. Traditional control curricula start with rigorous mathematical models and spend several weeks on mathematical manipulations before arriving at simple transfer functions for practical applications.…”

“…The survey demonstrated a remarkable consistency of views across the community for what could be considered 60−70% of the content, with differences largely being about what topics would be included in the last few weeks. As the results are already published [1], here we focus on summarizing some of the core conclusions and develop this by reviewing some of the repercussions on delivery. Specifically, we focus on developments in the community that support the survey outcomes while also being pertinent to the distance learning scenarios that are increasingly commonplace (and indeed necessary during COVID-19).…”

“…n recent years, the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) Technical Committee (TC) on Control Education focused on two main tasks: 1) supporting the partner International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) community in a survey of the worldwide community concerning priorities in university engineering control courses [1] and 2) outreach activities. The latter of these activities is currently undergoing a major refresh under Daniel Abramovitch and will hopefully be reported in a later submission.…”

Asymmetries in the Disturbance Compensation Methods for the Stable and Unstable First Order Plants

“…Although the mentioned articles bring numerous impressive and useful results, especially for unstable systems, some of them should be discussed in more details, since the proposed solutions therein might lead to inherently unstable design. Due to the inherent stability problems with the mentioned DTCs, the overall control solutions, including the undergraduate courses in systems and control engineering, are not so popular, especially when compared to the classical PID control [13]. In this work, we will clearly show some of the logical inconsistencies (even bordering on errors) on DTC designs for unstable processes that might be the main reason for their lower popularity.…”

Maximizing the Impact of Control at All Levels

“…In particular, two issues should be considered. First, control courses should be given in many university programs, so that people who could be exposed to control in their career can perceive its importance (Rossiter et al, 2020). Second, in the courses for those programs mostly related to automation (and also at the PhD level), the perspective of the application of different methodologies should be always discussed with the students, or in other words, in the explanation of the topics, the students should always be made aware of the problems in applying them in practice.…”