European Journal of Control 19 (2013) 341350

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

European Journal of Control

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ejcon

Closing the loops: An industrial perspective on the present and future impact
of control
Guido Sand n, Peter Terwiesch
ABB AG, Kallstadter Str. 1, 68309 Mannheim, Germany

art ic l e i nf o

a b s t r a c t

Article history:
Received 22 May 2013
Accepted 22 May 2013
Recommended by Alessandro Astol
Available online 31 May 2013

This paper provides an industrial perspective on the present and future trends and impact of control.
Applications in power systems, process automation and robotics are discussed against business,
environmental, and technology trends, so as to outline current and future elds of control research
and application.
& 2013 European Control Association. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Reduced buffers, increased output exibility, and tighter constraints and boundaries are generic requirements across a broad
range of industries and utilities that set the agenda for control. At
the same time, signicant performance advances and economies
of scale in sensors, actuators, communication, and information
technologies, together with new control techniques, provide the
generic ingredients for closing new feedback control loops.
One application area that is currently seeing a surge of interest is
control of the electric power grid. Increasing electricity demand,
combined with increasing expectations towards security of supply in
face of increasing intermittency of power generation due to renewable sources lead to new challenges at all levels of the power system.
Under headlines such as Smart Grid, the generic technology
advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are
paired with new sensors (e.g., smart meters at distribution level, or
wide-area phasor measurements at transmission level, etc.) and new
actuators, the latter often based on power electronics. These ingredients provide a powerful and cost-effective basis to extend feedback
control to parts of the grid that have historically seen mainly openloop/feed-forward control or less sophisticated forms of closed-loop
control; they trigger advances in control of High Voltage Direct
Current (HVDC) transmission, wide area control, and control of
smarter transmission and distribution grids in general.
Similarly, process automation is also a beneciary of the explosive
progress in information and communication technologies. Indicators
of this evolution are the increasing number of closed control loops,
the broadened application space of control systems, and the integration of control with neighboring disciplines. Examples range from
variable-speed drives as a combination of power electronics and
feedback control to unit- and plant-level model-predictive control,

Corresponding author.
E-mail address: guido.sand@de.abb.com (G. Sand).

with a capability to execute in real time increasingly more powerful

online optimization loops around more and more sophisticated
process models. The same technology trends also enable the convergence of power and automation, enabling two previously separate engineering and operations domains to work as one, utilizing
the same fundamental technologies and open standards.
And, last but not least, robotics is also an area that evolves
signicantly based on the above mentioned trends. Control has
always been at the core of industrial robot systems operation.
However, today the new trends towards multi-robot collaboration,
robothuman-collaboration, and operation in unstructured environments dene the next levels of challenge and opportunity for control.
The authors are convinced that identifying the right control
problems is equally important and challenging as nding the solution
to a given problem. As a consequence, this paper nishes with some
subjective views on future elds for control theory and practice. They
range from control for smart sites over enterprise control and asset
performance management to the human in the loop. Personal conclusions on research and innovation complete the paper.

2. Power system
2.1. Drivers and trends
One of the important challenges of our time is to nd an
acceptable balance between market, environmental, and security
of supply considerations for the supply of energy in general, and
for electricity in particular. Virtually all nations and industries are
faced with variations of this challenge since electricity consumption is at the basis of today's human activities. Companies and
countries have to contribute to nd and implement ways to
achieve new balances in a complex system of forces [6].
A particularly important potential for improvement is the tremendous loss of useful energy along the energy value chain. Today,
around 80% of the energy is dissipated to the environment. Only 20%

0947-3580/$ - see front matter & 2013 European Control Association. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejcon.2013.05.020

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G. Sand, P. Terwiesch / European Journal of Control 19 (2013) 341350

of the original primary energy input is nally used for its purpose,
and this amount could potentially be doubled with the help of
technology. Control and optimization can contribute to reduce the
losses in each step of the value chain: Starting from the extraction of
the prime energy carriers, process control enables higher availability
and more efcient operation of oil platforms, mines and solar panels.
In the transportation stage of prime energy carriers (and other
goods), control contributes to more efcient propulsion systems of
vessels as well as less leakage losses in pipelines. When it comes to
transformation of the primary energy into electricity, control
improves the efciency of the fuel combustion in power plants.
The grids that transmit and distribute the electricity become smarter in the sense that more information becomes available from less
costly, more ubiquitous, and more real-time sensors. On the basis of
this information, new loops can be closed. Voltage control and
reactive power control increase power availability, reduce line losses,
and increase substation efciency. Closed-loop control at the transmission grid level has been a standard practice for years. The
increased availability of information, through more affordable measurement, communication, and processing, now allows closing control loops also at the distribution grid level, which was previously
operated essentially in an open-loop manner. On a longer time scale,
further loops are also being closed through improved asset health
information, informing maintenance, extension and replacement
strategies, and through commercial metering and billing information.
Last but not least, energy management in industries as well as
commercial and residential buildings really means improved
control of energy use, again based on real-time information and
some level of process modeling.
2.2. Power system stability
In most industrialized countries, the stability of the power
systems and the availability of the power supply have been taken
for granted for a number of decades. Historically high power
reliability in combination with increasing digitization have
increased the economic and societal cost and consequences of
power outages as an example, the cost of a single-hour power

outage for all of Germany on a working day is estimated to easily

exceed $1 billion. At the same time, it should be noted that nationwide outages account for only a minority of power availability
problems in the vast majority of all countries. More than 70% of
power availability problems occur in the distribution part of the
power system and are thus more local.
While outages are thus becoming increasingly costly, they are
unfortunately also becoming more likely in a number of countries.
A rising share of renewable power sources leads to an increasing
intermittency of the overall power generation, and decreasing
capacity and stability margins at both transmission and distribution levels. The stability of the power systems is a large-scale
control challenge [12]. Global demand for electricity is increasing.
The consumption of electricity is growing at twice the rate of the
overall energy growth with the highest rates in industrializing
nations such as India and China.
An example from Italy from 2003 illustrates the fragility of a
power system: The loss of a tie line with 7000 MW of imported
power leads to a blackout after a couple of minutes (see Fig. 1).
2.3. Control of high voltage direct current transmission
With implementation of new policies strengthening the need
to integrate renewable power sources [11] and large scale electricity storages into the grid to transport electricity over long
distances, technology for High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC)
transmission has been developed and increasingly deployed especially during recent years. HVDC is a power transmission technology that signicantly increases the transmission capacity through
a given power corridor while reducing the losses. It transports
electricity over long distances, including by underground and
subsea power cables, for which alternating current (AC) would
be inhibited by reactive power problems.
HVDC is often an enabler for completely new structures and
connections in the power system. As an example, a 580 km subsea
cable HVDC connection links Norway and the Netherlands. Commissioned in 2008, it connects Norway's rich hydropower generation resources to the strong day peak demand of the Netherlands,

Italy separates from neighbors, losing 7000 MW import power

Generation shedding
Load shedding

Fig. 1. Power system instability situation.

G. Sand, P. Terwiesch / European Journal of Control 19 (2013) 341350

V1/1

Powerflow

343

V2/2

Fig. 2. Integrated ACDC power transmission (voltages V1, V2, phase angles 1, 2).

Fig. 4. Desertec DC grid scenario.

2.4. Opportunities and challenges in wide area control and HVDC

grids
Fig. 3. Machine angle response for power modulation control strategies.

resulting in a southbound 700 MW power ow during day time

that reverses during night time, when it exports excess Central
European base generation from nuclear and coal power plants
back to Norway. Seen from one of its connection terminals, the
system thus effectively acts as a huge power storage system.
As a second example, the grid connection of offshore wind
power far from shore has been enabled by progress in HVDC
technology. The rst HVDC connection between an offshore wind
park and the German mainland, through a 130 km subsea cable
and a 70 km underground cable, was commissioned 2009.
The majority of transmission and distribution grids are still
AC grids. The integration of DC transmission lines with an AC
grid requires good control over AC to DC and DC to AC conversion
(see Fig. 2).
Semiconductor-based actuators enable smooth and low-loss
power ow control in HVDC transmission lines and a controlled
change of the frequency and phase of electrical current at the
interface to an AC grid. Semiconductors enable high-frequency
electrical switches since they run without any mechanical movement. This power electronics technology realizes 5010,000
switches per second such that one AC frequency can be converted
to DC, and DC can be converted to another AC frequency.
New voltage-source converters as actuators in HVDC lines open
up opportunities for control, e.g., in damping control. These
converters enable the implementation of a mixed (active and
reactive) power modulation control strategy, which exhibits a
much better performance than one of the conventional active or
reactive power modulation control strategies (see Fig. 3). This new
HVDC technology (HVDC light) is evolving fast and the HVDC light
transmission capacity increases with impressing speed.

In the eld of wide-area monitoring and control, new opportunities and control challenges arise with new sensors: So called
phasor measurement units (PMUs) are units that are geographically distributed in the grid. They provide time-stamped measurements of voltage, current and the phase angle between them and
thus provide a distributed picture of the stability situation of the
grid of an entire country or even larger areas. PMUs enable the
step from local control to wide-area control of power grids. From a
control point of view, the status quo for years has been that
Static VAR Compensation (SVC) units are used to stabilize a local
area based on local measurements only. PMUs in a high-speed,
synchronous measurement infrastructure are used to monitor
wide-area stability. Inter-area oscillations are countered manually,
closing the loop through humans looking at computer monitors.
Automatically closing this larger control loop, so as to automate
the wide-area stability control, is an active area of industrial and
academic research and development, see, e.g., [17].
As transmission grids are becoming stronger and smarter, new
control challenges arise. Beyond that, the grid itself is changing at
an accelerated pace compared to the last few decades. Many
individual HVDC lines are already in operation, e.g., in the
European or the Chinese transmission grid, and many more are
under construction or are being planned.
While HVDC has so far been used essentially for point-to-point
transmission, technology is rapidly evolving towards overlay DC
grids, comprising multi-terminal links that connect more than two
points, and multi-taps (power highway exits). Initiatives such as
Desertec [5] envision the exploitation of renewable power
generation at scale in places that provide the most favorable
conditions for generation, such as the enormous solar energy in
African and the world's deserts, or wind power resources onshore
and offshore European and African coasts to cover the European
and the world's energy demand (see Fig. 4).

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An important step towards such future generation and transmission scenarios is the recently developed DC breaker for high
voltage transmission. The breaker combines ultra-fast mechanics
with power electronics, and will be capable of interrupting
power ows equivalent to the output of a large power station
within 5 ms that is 30 times faster than the blink of a human eye.
The DC grids will be integrated with the existing AC grids leading
to mixed AC/DC grids. These developments contribute to building
stronger and smarter grids, but they also change the way in which
they are operated. New control and protection paradigms are
needed to make these new grids stable and safe.

2.5. Smart distribution grids

The energy challenge does not only affect the control and
protection schemes for the transmission grid from a feedback
control point of view, the potentially larger transformation can be
expected in the distribution grid, where previously unavailable or
unaffordable information and communication technologies lay the
foundations for new control loops to be closed. Distribution grids
were originally built to distribute electricity from a central power
station to nearby consumers. In the past, power ows were
unidirectional, from central generation side to decentralized consumption. Now that decentralized generation, with different types
of distributed generators, e.g., biomass, photovoltaic cells and
wind turbines, as well as electricity storages are added to different
layers of the grid, the distribution grid evolves to a combined
distribution and collection grid with reduced boundary or even
reverse power ow. Distribution grids were originally operated
open loop, but the evolution towards a mixed distribution/collection calls for new control loops. Automatic voltage control is now
needed to manage the disturbances introduced by the distributed

generators. This type of control is enabled by the availability of

information about the state of the grid (smart grid). The inverse
power ow creates the need for solutions for fault current
limitation, reactive power management and grid stability. Bulk
storage enable parts of the grid to be operated independently for a
period of time calling for solutions for islanding control and
reconnection of this sub-grid as well as solutions for demand
response and load scheduling within this sub-grid (see Fig. 5).
The progression of the distribution grid towards a stronger and
smarter grid is supported by pilot cases around the world. Typical
elements of such pilot projects include smart homes/buildings with
demand response capability, distributed energy generation systems
including photovoltaic and wind, integration and use of electric
vehicles, energy storage for network support, high voltage ship-toshore connections in port cities, and smart primary substations.
The coordinated control of a mixed distribution/collection grid
can be formulated as an optimization task which simultaneously
optimizes the voltage and the reactive power over the entire grid
with the objective to minimize the grid losses and the peak power
demand. Under consideration of the power ow equations as well
as constraints on voltage, current and the operation of the
actuators, a Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Program arises. Compared
with the traditional local control the coordinated control leads to
around 2% savings [7].

2.6. Summary
Summarizing the above, the grid evolves from a very hierarchical
to a more at structure (see Fig. 6). The future grid will contain
similar elements than the past grid, but the elements will be
arranged differently. This evolution calls for closing new loops.
Enablers for new loops are new power technologies and new

islanding
control
G
SVC
voltage
and load
control

fault
current
limitation

load

load

storage

load

demand response
Fig. 5. Traditional distribution grid (black) and new elements and control tasks in a smart grid (blue). (For interpretation of the references to color in this gure caption, the
reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 6. Evolution of the grid.

G. Sand, P. Terwiesch / European Journal of Control 19 (2013) 341350

actuators (i.e. technologies that move the electrons) as well as new

sensors and improved communication (i.e. technologies that move
the bits and bytes).

3. Process automation
3.1. Drivers and trends
In an increasingly global and competitive market environment,
customers look for higher exibility, faster delivery, and lower cost
from producers, imposing a need to increase asset and labor
productivity, reduce capital employed, and to more efciently
use energy and raw materials (see Fig. 7).
These requirements tend to lead to a higher degree of process
integration and to reduced buffers of the production process and
supply chain, see Fig. 8 for an illustrative example. This trend is
present at all levels of an enterprise operation. It starts at unit level,
where buffer tanks between unit operations are reduced or eliminated, goes through plant and site levels, where in-bound and outbound inventories in storage tanks and warehouses are cut, and goes
all the way to company and global supply chain levels, where entire
value chains are re-dened and re-allocated between companies.
Tighter economics and higher exibility in production plant
operation call for faster start-ups, shut-downs and more frequent
grade changes. In addition, product specications and expectations towards product quality are tightening. Also, environmental,
health, and safety performance are becoming prerequisites to
commercially successful operation, often against increasingly
stringent requirements and with increasingly more severe consequences after violation. From a control point of view, the
combination of these trends calls for higher dynamic performance
under tighter constraints.
Fortunately, at the same time signicant performance advances
and economies of scale are observed in new and better sensors
and actuators, and particularly around communication and

Throughput
Design limit

Profit

Lost opportunity
Operating
target

Break Even

Plant upset

Loss

Partial shut-down
Shut-down
Startup
Time
Fig. 7. Illustration of need for higher exibility and productivity.

345

information technologies. Together with new control techniques,

this provides the generic ingredients for closing new feedback
control loops. As sensors become more ubiquitous, more affordable and more information rich, they enable enhanced functionality such as smart instruments which not only deliver the
measured value but also information about the reliability of the
measurement and its own health status. Moreover, completely
new types of sensors are being deployed, such as in-line analyzers
that evolve the ability of composition measurements from daily or
hourly manual samples towards on-line, real-time information.
Also actuators are becoming more dynamic and more affordable,
including variable-speed control drives that combine signicant
energy efciency improvements with improved control characteristics compared to xed-speed motors for pumps or fans that work
in combination with controlled throttle valves.
Wireless communication technology becomes more affordable
and increases in bandwidth. This technology allows operators to
roam around the plant and to put sensors for start-ups or process
modications in places that were out of reach before. The latency
in communication is decreasing while the increased speed is fast
enough to be considered delay-free for practical purposes in the
majority of process control applications. However, the increasing
diversication of communications standards also causes inefciencies in integration and interoperability of systems.
The hardware and software for data processing is also becoming faster, more powerful and more affordable. However, their life
cycles are becoming shorter as well, in particular in comparison
with the life cycle of the controlled process plant or utility
installation. This mismatch of life times is becoming more and
more a challenge for automation technology in case process
specic applications have to be migrated to new hardware and
software platforms for instance. Cyber security is another consideration and an area of growing concern in an increasingly
networked world in which more and more commercial off-theshelf information and communication technologies are being
deployed, exposing sensitive information and potentially vulnerable systems to an ever-increasing list of threat potentials. With
these challenges, research and development work on new solutions and architectures to mitigate them is also growing.
So why is feedback control and its economic and societal impact
not more visible? Astrom has long been talking about automatic
control as a hidden technology [2]. Technologies for sensing, acting,
communicating and data processing are increasingly integrated and
brought to market as one integrated product, see, e.g., section Energy
efciency in industry for the variable speed-drive example. This
integration often hides the actual control function or reduces its
visibility, so that it becomes more and more difcult to assign the
economic or technological success of an integrated system to one
particular technology such as control.
Moore's Law has provided predictable growth in processing
power, bandwidth and memory hugely contributing to control
and its impact. Specically in process automation, this explosive
progress in information and communication technologies is used
not only to close classical control loops faster and at lower cost per

Fig. 8. Process ow sheet with buffer (left) and with higher degree of integration (right).

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G. Sand, P. Terwiesch / European Journal of Control 19 (2013) 341350

Number of I/O

Concrete data on actual savings is usually not shared widely.

Nonetheless, the four application examples of variable speeddrives can be considered typical of their categories and illustrate
a high impact on energy efciency and emissions:

Breadth of domain
Fig. 9. Evolution of control rooms over the last century.

function, it is also a main driver for tighter information integration, both on device and on systems level. The number of input/
output points (I/O) of process control systems increases continuously, and more control loops than ever are being closed through
automation (see Fig. 9).
Yet not only the number of loops is increasing, but also the
application space of control systems is getting broader. The integration of data and information from distributed and heterogeneous
sources progresses: in addition to classical process control, the health
status of the plant and its equipment is monitored, mathematical
models increasingly exist not only for process dynamics but also for
lifetime consumption and expected maintenance needs as a function
of operating conditions, allowing predictive maintenance and
lifetime-conscious operation to be considered in the automation.
Moreover, in times of higher volatility of energy and feedstock
markets, commercial interfaces of control systems, e.g., to automatically take into account variations in energy spot markets for energy,
raw material, or product prices, are becoming more common
especially in energy- and material-intensive industries.
3.2. Energy efciency in industry
Energy efciency is thus a challenge, but also a differentiation
opportunity also in industry. Improving the energy efciency of
industrial production, e.g., to keep it in the top quartile of its
industry, is often not only a competitive necessity but also
nancially attractive. The direct payback period of energy efciency measures in industries like aluminum, steel, paper, cement
or reneries, is usually a few years but often as low as a few
months, and additional benets are often gained in conjunction
with improved control over the process and its output.
Particularly substantial savings are found around the application of electrical motors. Industry uses 50% of global electricity,
two thirds of that in motors. One way to unlock part of the energy
savings potential are variable speed drives. Varying the speed of a
motor through a drive is different from other control strategies
(such as throttling, bypassing, on/off control for ow control
applications). In contrast to strategies that use exceeding mechanical power for control, a variable speed drive provides the process
exactly with the necessary mechanical power.
In fact, a variable-speed drive is an integrated device comprising sensor, actuator and controller. Given that variable speed
drives achieve typical energy savings of 3050%, the impact of
closing this loop is signicant. The market penetration is already in
the order of 10% showing both, the acceptance of this technology
and considerable unlocked potential.

1. Pump control: Replacing the valves and adding drives to xedspeed pump motors at a steel mill of China Steel at Taiwan led
to energy savings of some 2.9 GWh per year.
2. Fan control: Installing AC drive controls for two 1000 hp xedspeed fans at a cement plant (Cruz Azul, Mexico) reduced the
energy consumption by some 5.5 MWh per year.
3. Offshore platform power (run by Statoil, Norway): Replacing
gas turbines by high voltage motors and drives with a HVDC
connection bringing hydropower from mainland saves 130
million kg CO2 emissions per year.
4. Ship propulsion: Fitting two ferries owned by ShinNihonkai
(Japan) with Azipod propulsion systems Reduced CO2 emissions by around 68 million kg yearly.1

3.3. Model predictive control

The increase of available computing power enables model
predictive control (MPC) applications even in industries with high
sampling frequencies and high problem complexity such as pulp
and paper, rolling mills in metals and minerals (see Fig. 10).
Again, commercial benets are often kept proprietary, but the
following three examples quantify typical benets of MPC
applications:
1. The application of an MPC approach to a boiler-turbine at a
pulp and paper mill in South Africa led to coal savings
equivalent of more than one million US$ per year.
2. MPC based multivariable control of a supercalendering process
in paper production reduced quality variations by around 50%.
3. MPC of the rotary kiln for cement clinker production, replacing
a fuzzy controller, improved the energy efciency and productivity equivalent to savings of around 10 M US$ per year, and it
reduced the coal consumption by around 1000 t per year [16].
Without any doubt, models are a vital part of MPC technology. A
continued trend in modeling is towards models that cover a broader
scope including energy and asset performance aspects, and which
exhibit a higher degree of complexity. The application domains of
plant and process models range from the plant oor level up to the
plant management level and cover the entire life cycle of a plant from
engineering over operation to maintenance. Models are actually used
for engineering tests (e.g., factory acceptance test), advanced control
and estimation, optimization, monitoring and diagnostics, and training simulators. However, one has to admit that modeling and model
engineering is typically still the most complex and costly part in most
applications. Potential for cost reduction is in better re-use of model
parameters, model topologies, or model libraries.
3.4. New types of loops
Further opportunities for integration and closing new loops
arise from wireless technologies, the convergence of power and
automation, and new visualization technologies.
Open standards such as wireless HART help to unlock stranded
process and plant information. The intrinsic low-cost nature of
1
Azipods are marine propulsion units consisting of diesel-electric-driven
propellers mounted on a steerable pod where all propulsion power is delivered
by an integrated electric motor.

G. Sand, P. Terwiesch / European Journal of Control 19 (2013) 341350

347

Fig. 10. The advancing MPC frontier industry requirements vs. available processing power.

Process & Power Workplaces

Control Room

Control System
Plant Network

Process Control
Server

Controller

Controller

Control

Profibus/Profinet

IEC 61850

LV Switchgear
Drives
Motor starters

Protection &
Control IEDs

Instruments

Process

Process
Instrumentation

Process
Electrification

Substation
Automation

Fig. 11. Convergence of power and automation.

wireless sensors allows measuring of new points permanently or

temporarily. This enables not only tighter process control but also
more effective service and asset management applications.
Open standards such as IEC 61850 helps power and automation
to converge and implement a single control system for both
process and power automation implying lower investment and
lifecycle costs, as well as higher standardization, availability and
reliability (see Fig. 11).
New visualization technologies enable the integration of real and
virtual worlds and to seamlessly embed the human in the loop. High
performance HMI's improve the operators effectiveness and mobile
devices are enablers to integrate even maintenance personnel into
the loop.
The application areas and examples demonstrate the high impact
of control technology in the productivity and energy efciency on
production systems. However, due to the increasingly tight integration into other information and communication technology, as well
as sensor an actuator technology, the share of the control technology
is increasingly difcult to distinguish.

4. Robotics
The impact of control on robotics is signicant: Control has
always been at the core of industrial robot systems operation [3].
Traditionally, robots work in well-structured environments relatively independently of each other. Classic control objectives for
each single robot are short cycle times and robustness in path
tracking. Robots must avoid collision with the work parts which
particularly means that their last move must be executed without
overshoot. Control has to meet this requirement even in face of
fast movements executed with heavy and varying loads. Robots
have to move along pre-dened paths independently of speed,
load and other changing parameters. The controls need to be
robust to ensure repeatable paths. Robot controls are typically
based on high-order grey box models. Models of the robot's
kinematics are used to transform the commanded trajectory
usually specied in Cartesian space into the joint coordinates the
underlying control loops act on. Dynamic models generate the
feed-forward signals to ensure path accuracy with varying loads.

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G. Sand, P. Terwiesch / European Journal of Control 19 (2013) 341350

Vibration damping is commonly achieved with individually tuned

lters based on inputoutput models.
4.1. Energy efciency in robotics
The classic control objectives are recently complemented by
energy efciency. Field bus standards like PROFI Energy enable
electric demand management for assembly plants. During production stops the energy consumption is reduced by commanding the
controller of a single or even a eet of robots to enter standbymode, and by starting the eet up again in a coordinated way
heavy peak loads can be avoided. The objective to minimize
energy consumption found its way in trajectory optimization:
the objective of minimum cycle times can be balanced with the
objective of minimum electricity consumption.
4.2. Multi-robot and robothuman collaboration
A trend in robotics is towards multi-robot collaboration (e.g., to
share heavy loads), robothuman-collaboration (e.g., to unlock synergies in small parts assembly, see Fig. 12), and the operation in
unstructured environments (e.g., like autonomous transport vehicles
entering the shop oor). These trends towards higher complexity
pose challenges in the areas of higher level coordinated control,
adaptive control and robust control.
The problem of coordinated multi-robot control is virtually
solved for structured environments (see, e.g., ABB's MultiMove
option of the RobotWare) while control in unstructured environments is still a challenge. The increasing complexity and dynamics
of production environments prohibit their comprehensive modeling at reasonable costs. Conceptual approaches to cope with
limited knowledge about the environment cover:
1. Online integration of sensor data into path planning algorithms:
Advanced sensors like point-cloud sensors or force sensors
generate information about the environment and feed them
into online (servoing) as well as ofine path planning
algorithms.
2. Sensor-based control programming: Particularly for assembly
tasks, the ofine generation of the robot program is hard to
achieve because of the tolerances of the involved work pieces.
To cope with this problem sensor information is taken into
account while the robot is moving.
3. Skill-based robot control: Giving the robot system more autonomy to solve an assembly task by dening a so called assembly
skill. The robot controller is taking sensor data as well as
internal information into account to learn and optimize the
task execution.

Fig. 13. Single vs. multicriterion path planning. Left, minimum cycle time. Right,
minimum cycle time and minimum risk of injury.

Control challenges in humanrobot-collaboration are in the

rst place driven by safety considerations. In case of dangerous
situations, e.g., a human entering the workspace of a robot, the
machine has to react instantaneously and to re-plan the trajectory
in order not to harm the worker. The secondary objective is of
course to determine a safe trajectory that keeps the productivity at
its maximum (see Fig. 13).
Moreover, the increasing degree of interaction between
humans and robots triggers a paradigm change in robot control
design. Research on human-centric path planning aims at trajectories which appear natural to the human. In order to be
accepted by its human collaborator, a robot has to behave and
react in an intuitively foreseeable way. To unlock the synergies
between humans and robots and to increase the overall productivity, human factors and ergonomics pose not only requirements
for control design but for the overall design of the robot in general.

5. Future challenges
The previous sections demonstrated both, the impact of control
on technological achievements in power systems, process automation and robotics and the future need of control for the further
evolution of these technologies.
The authors are convinced that identifying the right control
problems is equally important and challenging as nding the
solution to a given problem. The remainder of this section sketches
new challenging elds for control technology that are not included
in the above.
5.1. Control for smart sites

Fig. 12. Humanrobot collaboration in small parts assembly.

The trend towards decentralized generation of renewable

energy requires a more local control of energy within a commercial or industrial site to improve energy efciency and reduce
dependency from external supply. Smart meters measure the
energy consumption and micro-grids network all systems including smart buildings, smart plants as well as electricity consumption of Electric Vehicles (EV). Energy consumption of single rooms,
devices and units is controlled individually. Electrical loads are
exibly switched on and off or are shifted over time. Locally
generated energy is either consumed locally or fed into the grid.
Buildings and EVs are used as energy storage.
This trend calls for forecasting methods for renewable electricity generation and load proles as a basis for optimizing control
strategies for power ow to and from the grid as well as for energy

G. Sand, P. Terwiesch / European Journal of Control 19 (2013) 341350

5.2. Enterprise control

The increasing volatility and dynamics of energy cost, raw
material cost, and production value set the need for real-time
enterprise control, i.e. fully integrated control of an entire enterprise
from the production level up to the business level. Enterprise control
systems have to break the silos of automation and information that
exist throughout industrial operation in terms of multiples systems
(distributed control systems, safety control systems, manufacturing
execution software, SCADA systems, HMI software, advanced application software and ERP systems) in order to close new loops and
increase the agility of the enterprise [13].
Collaborative Process Automation Systems (CPAS) address the
integration of systems on production level [9], and related the
automation standard ISA-95 [1] provides generic guidelines about
the IT infrastructure for enterprise-control system integration.
Particular control challenges arise for instance when dynamic
parameters from the business systems are mirrowed into the
production control systems. One example might be an optimizing
Model Predictive Controller (MPC) with an economic objective
function including product prices which are periodically updated
through the sales system. Another example might be a short-term
production scheduler with an energy aware objective function
which dynamically interacts with an energy procurement system
[8]. In both examples questions of global stability and convergence
of the systems combined of two subsystems arise.

5.3. Asset performance management for the process industries

The utilization and the availability of processing plant assets
are increasingly considered as two sides of the same coin. Limiting
the focus to either improvement of asset utilization through plant
operations measures or improvement of asset availability
improvement through plant maintenance measures alone will
provide an incomplete view of the performance. The task of asset
performance management is to balance utilization and availability
improvement under special consideration of critical issues and
operational constraints [4].
Maintenance and the management of asset availability are an
area where increasingly many loops are closed. Asset monitoring
and diagnosis functionality with real-time asset information is
advancing and integrated in control systems such that asset
performance and maintenance measures can be considered in
process operations. New sensors for asset condition monitoring (e.
g., for monitoring circulating stator currents for fault diagnosis in
large electric motors) and mobile devices for eld service engineers (e.g., mobile computers providing augmented reality) contribute further to close maintenance loops.
Real-time process data is the basis of process control. This type
of data is increasingly complemented by real-time plant asset data
which allows for conclusions on the asset performance. Asset
performance is inuenced by wear, corrosion and control loop
performance for instance. Control challenges are to turn these
conclusions into valuable actions on various levels in the automation hierarchy such as maintenance planning, production planning, real-time optimization and production control, and to
integrate these new maintenance control loops with the process
control loops.

5.4. Human in the loop

Humans interact with power systems, processing systems and
robot systems through automation systems. They process information and react with some inertness such that they can be
considered as dynamic subsystems of the control loops. Examples
from the areas touched in this paper are as follows:
1. In the context of electrical grids, the human behavior determines part of the load prole, which is vice versa tried to be
inuenced by means of demand response mechanisms such as
high electricity prices at times of low electricity generation.
2. Operators of process plants have the task to start-up and shut
down plants, supervise the automated operation, and diagnose
and manage disturbances. Mines, offshore oil platforms and
other plants in harsh environments are more and more
operated from remote. Remote technologies also enable control
rooms of multiple plants to be merged such that a single
operator manages a multitude of plants. These trends set the
need for high performance humanmachine interfaces that
provide information in an aggregated, conclusive and actionable manner. Events like the Deep Water Horizon disaster in
the Gulf of Mexico underpin the impact of well-trained plant
operators and advanced control rooms on the plant safety [15].
3. In small parts assembly robots are on their way become
complementing coworkers of humans.
The role of the human in automated industrial processing
systems evolves from a disturbance or a part of the systems
that is not automated yet to an integral part of the control loops
with its own strengths and limitations. From an economic standpoint, the human is essential to achieve an optimum degree of
automation (see Fig. 14). A challenge for control perspective is to
design the control loops such that the human capabilities are
exploited and human failures are avoided. The following three
examples provide ideas on how to achieve an optimized balance
between the human and the automation system:
1. Alarm management standards recommend limiting the average
alarm rate to 10 s per h and the peak alarm rate to few 100 s
per h. Alarm oods with 1000 s of alarms per hour overload the
operator and harbor the risk of unmanageable situations.
Modern alarm management systems support the operator
through alarm analysis and alarm hiding functionality. However, the vision is a degree of automation that leaves only the
most complex situations to human decision makers.

semi-automated production
cost

storage management. The vision is to achieve a fully networked

and transparent site with a control system that enables energy
efcient and (partially) autarkic operation.

349

manual production
automated production
0%

100%
degree of automation
Fig. 14. Optimum degree of automation.

350

G. Sand, P. Terwiesch / European Journal of Control 19 (2013) 341350

2. Humans are an indispensable part of the loop to handle

situations that seldom occur or are unforeseeable. Mass data
displays are a means to aggregate the enormous amounts of
data that emerge in modern, highly automated production and
utility systems. Humans use their ability to recognize patterns
and to relate them to their experiential knowledge to identify
situations that are hard to identify automatically. The systematic exploration of humans' capability to capture complex and
uncertain situations is still in its infancy.
3. Mobile devices and mobile technologies enable new modes of
collaboration between advanced control systems, eld engineers, plant operators and plant managers. Real-information
about the plant performance as well as detailed performance
information about particular assets becomes available anywhere on site and off site. Virtual reality technology can be
used to visually link the information with the real world. If this
triggers actions, they can immediately be implemented. Moreover, if information on the plant status is collected in the eld,
e.g., through visual inspection, it can immediately be fed back
to the information and control systems.
6. Personal conclusions
This paper outlined the relationships between generic business
and societal drivers and technology trends, applications in power
systems, process automation and robotics, and challenging future
elds of activity for control. A number of examples illustrated the
impact of control on the industrial world with tightened constraints and on the energy challenge. Further future challenges and
technology trends were identied as well as innovative control
solutions that will also impact the future of the eld.
The perspective on the impact of control, in this paper, is based
upon experience of a leading provider of technologies for power
systems, process automation and robotics. The experience range
over various maturity levels of the technology from research and
development over piloting to commercialization. For further reading on the impact of control technology in domains such as
aerospace, automotive, biological systems, and others the reader
is referred to the work of [10] and the papers therein.
In general terms, one can say that control has an impact if a
control problem matches with a control solution. The future
impact of control requires innovation. A simple denition of
innovation is that at least one of the three elements mentioned
before has to be new: the problem, the solution or the match. Or in
other terms, innovation is a technological idea that found its way
into business (or vice versa a new business found its enabling
technological idea). This paper focused on new technology trends
and future challenges. However, the task to match a problem with
a solution or to bring an idea to the business should not be
overseen.
Continuous or evolutionary innovation evolves or improves an
existing problemsolution match. It exploits existing infrastructure in
terms organizational setup, personal networks and work processes.
More challenging, and also more risky while at the same time
potentially more rewarding, is disruptive or revolutionary innovation
which creates new problemsolutionmatches. An important success
factor is to create an infrastructure and environment that supports
this type of innovation. A challenging phase in the growth process of
accepting a new technology is to cross the chasm between
technology enthusiasts and pragmatists [14].

It is the authors' belief that further convergence of power and

automation with a strong impact of control requires both, continuous and disruptive innovation. In particular for the latter,
prerequisites are partnerships in various dimensions. In the
dimension of technologies control has to partner with neighboring
elds. The impact will not be nearly as big without IT, communications, power electronics to name but a few. Those and control
theory and systems are interdependent: successful innovation
needs both. Partnering is also needed along the innovation value
chain covering academic and industrial research, technology
providers and end users. Innovative ideas are often born at the
interfaces between these partners, and these partnerships often
provide the right infrastructure and environments to cross the
chasm.

Acknowledgments
The paper is based on the results obtained from subject matter
experts and colleagues at ABB. We acknowledge the provision of
results by M. Larsson and S.Thorburn in the area of power systems;
C. Ganz, E. Gallestey and S. Chen in the area of process automation;
and T. Reisinger and B. Matthias in the area of robotics.

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