Cassandras to Receive IEEE Control Systems Technology Award
By Samantha Gordon (COM’12) and Rachel Harrington
This year’s IEEE Control Systems Technology Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to control systems technology, will be awarded to Professor Christos Cassandras (ECE, SE, CISE), at the Conference on Decision and Control. He is being honored for his design and commercial development of the discrete event and hybrid system simulator, SimEvents.
Cassandras, Head of the Division of Systems Engineering, and Michael Clune of The MathWorks collaborated for more than five years on SimEvents, which allows users to simulate event-driven processes along with time-driven ones such as the stages of a manufacturing process. Through these simulations, users can identify bottlenecks and determine resource requirements. The program also facilitates the design of hardware architectures, distributed control systems and sensor and communication networks for aerospace, automotive, electronics and other applications.
“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 said. “I think this collaboration between The MathWorks and myself promotes a good model for academia-industry cooperation.”
The Conference on Decision and Control will celebrate its 50th anniversary this year and take place December 12-15, 2011, in Orlando, Florida.