Christos Cassandras Receives IEEE Control Systems Technology Award
On December 14, 2011, Christos Cassandras (ECE/SE) received the IEEE Control Systems Technology Award at the Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) in Orlando, Florida.
The IEEE Control Systems Technology Award recognizes outstanding contributions to control systems technology. Cassandras was honored for his design and commercial development of the discrete event and hybrid system simulator, SimEvents.
Cassandras and research partner, Michael Clune of The MathWorks, collaborated between 2003 and 2008 on SimEvents, which allows users to simulate event-driven processes along with time-driven ones – for example, the stages of a manufacturing process – so that bottlenecks can be identified and resource requirements can be determined. The program also facilitates the design of hardware architectures, distributed control systems, and sensor and communication networks for aerospace, automotive, and electronics applications among many others.
“I’m very pleased to see a large part of my research in discrete event and hybrid systems turned into a product useful to many,” Cassandras says of his work with Clune. “I think this collaboration between The MathWorks and myself is recognized at this level – it promotes a good model for academia-industry cooperation.”