REPORT OF MEETING
Tokyo IFAC Symposium on Systems Engineering THE IFAC Tokyo Symposium on Systems Engineering for Control Design held during August [25][26][27][28] 1965, was attended by about 225 persons, 75 from abroad and 150 from Japan. It was considered to be highly successful and reflected the increased interest in broad systems questions in many of the IFAC countries. Of the 49 papers presented, USA with 16, Japan with 14, UK with 5, and USSR and Canada with 3, were the principal contributors. The fields of transportation, production control, utilities, learning systems, multilevel systems, optimization, and process identification received especial attention. An Expository lecture on Systems Engineering Challenges and Opportunities for Control was presented by Harold Chestnut. Another Keynote address by Academician V. A. Trapeznikov, USSR, served to underscore the importance of economic considerations including profitability as a basis for sound systems engineering action.
The field of systems engineering is one of great and increasing importance to persons concerned with automatic control. Because of the large size and complexity of the systems being built, there exists a need for a better understanding of how to handle such problems. It is apparent that many of the problems of the real world of control were explored in this Symposium. The mathematical theory emphasis was placed in a more proper perspective to the practical applications considerations. The reception of the attendees to this symposium was most favorable.
The opening remarks at the Symposium of Dr. A. A. Voronov of the USSR, Vice Chairman of the IFAC Theory Committee and the closing remarks of Prof. Irving Lefkowitz of Case Institute, USA, speaking for the IFAC Applications Committee do a fine job of summarizing the spirit of this Systems Engineering Symposium.
Dr. VORONOV: On behalf of the IFAC Theory Committee I have the honor to greet the assembled delegates and the guests of the Tokyo Symposium on Systems Engineering for Control Systems Design. This is the first Symposium sponsored by IFAC dedicated to one of the newest and important direction in automatic control theory--system apl~roach to the design of control systems.
The automatization in its first stage made its aim to remove a man from the separate controlling process substituting him by an automatic device. But in present the automatic control should be treated more widely and to include both automatic and manual control systems, i'n which decision making is performed by a man. Just among control systems including a man are the most complicated multidimensional systems interacting with the complicated environment. Evaluation of the state of these systems demands often handling of enormous amount of information and performing of specification very complicated situation like the pattern recognition. The decision making concerning controlling inputs also demands the preliminary solution of the problem of optimization control. In this connection not only new parts, as optimal control theory, learning systems theory and so