The Department is involved in the various missions of Supélec: continuing education, engineer and master degrees courses and research.

Skills

The fields of expertise of the Automatic Control Department are modeling, optimization and control of uncertain dynamic systems. In addition to being part of the scientific community, the department’s research team is also recognized by the industrial sector in very numerous domains, for example, aerospace, mechanical, automotive and energy sectors. The key research topics of the team are robustification or retuning of controllers, as a response to a strong industrial demand, as well as taking constraints into accounts at an early stage during the design phase of the control structure, a problem for which the team is considered to be among the leaders.

Engineer and master degrees courses

The department contributes to the three-year teaching program and mainly in the third year “Systems and Control (AS)” major. It also takes part in the program of the Master degree “Automatics and Signal Treatment Science” (ATSI) co-accredited between Supélec and the University Paris Sud. The department is implicated in several teaching teams and is responsible of four of them.

Continuing education

Concerning continuing education of Supélec, the Department proposes and organizes five continuing education programs in Control. Besides, members of the Department are also involved in six continuing education in the field of Signals, Real-time computing and Mathematics-Statistics.

Research

As for research and industrial relations, research is carried out within the E3S (SUPELEC SYSTEMS SCIENCES) team EA 4454 of the Ministry of National Education, Research and Technology (MENRT), following two axes grouped in a unique theme SyDICO (Uncertain Dynamic Systems, Control and Optimization).

·        Methodology: Control, Identification and Optimization

·        Applications: Uncertain Complex Systems

The objective of both axes is to adapt or improve recent control laws and provide new emerging approaches in order to solve efficiently problems related to uncertain and complex dynamic phenomena.

International collaborations

In 2010, the Department hosted foreign Master degree students in addition to Spanish interns and Romanian interns from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, within the framework of exchange programs. It also hosted researchers from the University of Newcastle in Australia, University of Craiova in Romania, Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and NTNU of Trondheim in Norway. Several members of the Department were advisors of students completing their third year abroad (USA, UK, Sweden, Spain, Germany…), and also advisors of long internships students going in industry or companies in the framework of a year-long training period between their second and third year engineer degree.

General Interest Activities

Members of the Department are involved in the laboratory works, the TIPE (Personal Initiative work) exam and oral exams in Industrial Sciences of the PSI (Physics and Industrial Sciences) branch, all related to the national ranking competitive examination to enter Supélec.

Perspectives

In order to amplify and diversify its cooperation, and to adapt to the industrial world evolution, the Department aims at enlarging its fields of applications, in particular in the direction of the environmental or biotechnologies sectors. It also starts prospective studies related to issues and impacts of Control, mostly in terms of economical optimization and techniques for complex processes, for instance energy in buildings or smart grids.