Challenges and New Directions in Control Engineering Education

The paper discusses the changes and challenges in the current teaching of Automatic Control systems. Modern society has developed into a phase where the traditional process industry is not at all the only area where dynamic modelling, understanding the feedback, control engineering, autonomous systems and generally the discipline of Automatic control have to be mastered. That gives a huge challenge to the teaching of automatic control in general, especially when fewer and fewer students are entering engineering schools and as the basic skills in mathematics and physics seem to be decreasing everywhere. On the other hand, automation (to be understood broadly including automatic control and control engineering, autonomous systems etc.) as a discipline is in a state of change: it seems to be hidden in other engineering fields, and there seems to be opinions that it should actually be taught within specific application areas, e.g. in electrical engineering, machine design, chemical process engineering etc. In the old school of control engineering the idea is actually vice versa: automatic control is seen as a general, mathematically and physically well-defined discipline, which can the be applied in various application areas and engineering fields. The societal and industrial viewpoints must both be considered, when looking at the future of control education. These aspects are discussed in the paper.