Control Teaching and Theory: An Industrial Point of View

For the university, control is a single discipline taught most efficiently on the basis of a generalized theory. For each industrial organization, control is one of the many technologies used to carry out its commercial goals in terms of its own and its customer´s technical needs and traditions. Because each industry is different, each control technology is different. Beyond these commercial differences, every industry needs the simplest control design compatible with its goals, its competitive environment, and any saleable benefits. We know that industrial practice differs from available, teachable theoretical technique in such obvious dimensions as nonlinearity, high-order dynamics, and process uncertainty. But more subtle are the differences in scale of industrial designs over what can be taught (the 100-1000 loop design rather than the 2- or 3-loop design), or the requirements for compatibility with human operation and maintenance with the multidisciplinary system design. Industries with established expertise should not expect entry-level engineers to know all of this. The university challenge is to provide students with a basic design capability, an awareness of different points of view, an abstract cynicism conveying the limitations of all analysis, and a limited experimental experience which validates the cynicism but confirms that all real design problems can be simply solved.