Control Systems History

How the conference series "Control Systems" came to be

In 1968 Lennart Eriksson started the "Physics Department" (FA) at STFI, the Swedish Research Institute for forest based products. He and Sven Gunnar Edlund built a successful enterprise with a strong focus on research geared at obtaining useful results in the field of new measurement and control systems for the Pulp and Paper Industry.

The work at the physics department resulted in a large number of breakthrough systems. The STFI Cross Machine Control System, the STFI OPTI Kappa and the STFI Fibermaster are just a few of the systems that are worldwide recognized as having opened up for new opportunities in the measurement and control arena.

The two of them recognized the need for an international forum for knowledge exchange and, together with SPCI (the Swedish Association for Pulp and Paper Engineers), they organized the first Control Systems conference in Stockholm in 1982 entitled "Control Systems in the Pulp and Paper Industry - State of the art and the future".

The conference program was very ambitious and had a strong focus on the user perspective. The program was designed around invited speakers, mainly representing users and researchers. Suppliers played a very limited role in the program. This first conference counted over 500 participants and more than 100 exhibitors.

The success inspired cooperation with SPCI sister organisations in Canada, and later also in Finland. A new Control Systems Conference was organised in Stockholm 1986 and it was decided that the conference should thereafter alternate between Canada and Sweden/Finland.

I have tried to compile a list of the Control Systems conferences through the years. A list of all conferences held is presented below. I have also tried to to compile "Call for Papers" and "Conference Programs" for the various conferences as well as statistics about them (E.g. Number of Papers submitted and number of Papers presented, as well as the Number of Attendants, Exhibitors and Posters).

This work is still in progress. Conference Documentation is found here (for logged in users).

If you can provide more info about the conferences I will gladly include them in the compilation for future reference.
Send an email to ControlSystems-at-handix-dot-se (ignore the minuses and replace "at" and "dot" with you-know-what)

List of all Control Systems Conferences