New-ACE

Department of Electronic And Electrical Engineering,
Loughborough University, Loughborough,
Leicestershire
LE11 3TU

Phone: +44 (0)1509 227 029

Professor Roger Goodall graduated from Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1968.  After working for two years for one of the GEC companies he joined British Rail's R & D Division in Derby, where he was involved in a variety of control-related projects connected with the railway industry.  In 1982 he took up an academic position in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at Loughborough University, and is currently Professor of Control Systems Engineering.  His research is concerned with a variety of practical applications of advanced control, usually for high performance electro-mechanical systems. He has had a number of research grants from EPSRC, the EC and industry concerned with active railway vehicle suspensions, advanced data fusion architectures for aerospace applications, and targetted processor architectures for implementation of high-performance controllers. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering as well as both the IEE and IMechE. He is also well known internationally for his research in rail vehicle technology and amonst other external activities he is  Chairman of the UK Automatic Control Council (the UK's national member organization of  IFAC), and will be a Vice-President of IFAC for the triennium 2008-2011.

Control has a strongly mathematical basis, and so a significant proportion of control-related research in universities is essentially applied mathematics.  However, although the mathematical foundations are vital to the subject, the true test of the theoretical developments is in their application, and this excitement with blending theory and practice to create effective, high-performance control system solutions is what has driven the speaker's career.  The lecture will present (in a partly narrative, partly technical manner) the way in which his view of control has developed during his career:  some highly formative experiences immediately after graduation, a variety of rewarding and very practical projects whilst working in industry, through to the most recent results emerging from his current research portfolio.

Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering,
Loughborough University, Loughborough,
Leicestershire
LE11 3TU

Phone - +44 (0)1509 635 348

Educated at the Immingham School, North East Lincolnshire. BSc in Physics at Imperial College, London (1987), PhD in Photonuclear Physics at Edinburgh University (1990). Worked as an RA and then SSO in the Energy Research Unit at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (1990-1999) and then at the green electricity supply company Good Energy (1999-2001). Appointed as a Senior Lecturer at Loughborough University in 2001.

University Road,
Belfast,
BT7 1NN,
Northern Ireland, UK

Email - g.irwin@ee.qub.ac.uk

Professor George Irwin leads the Intelligent Systems and Control Research group and is Director of the University Virtual Engineering Centre at Queen University Belfast. He has been elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Member of the Royal Irish Academy and is a Chartered Engineer, an IEEE Fellow, a Fellow of the IEE and a Fellow of the Institute of Measurement and Control.

Prof Irwin’s research covers identification, monitoring, and control, including neural networks, fuzzy neural systems and multivariate statistics and he has published over 350 research papers and 12 edited books. He is currently working on wireless networked control systems, fault diagnosis of internal combustion engines and novel techniques for fast temperature measurement and was Technical Director of Anex6 Ltd, a spin out company from his group specialising in process monitoring.

He has been awarded a number of prizes including four IEE Premiums, a Best Paper award from the Czech Academy of Sciences and the 2002 Honeywell International Medal from the Institute of Measurement and Control. International recognitions include Honorary Professor at Harbin Institute of Technology and Shandong University, and Visiting Professor at Shanghai University.

Professor Irwin is a former Editor-in-Chief of the IFAC Journal Control Engineering Practice and past chair of the UK Automatic Control Council. He currently chairs the IFAC Publications Committee and serves on the editorial boards of several journals.

Currently there is much interest in using off-the-shelf wireless data networks for monitoring and control. This is stimulated by the commercial opportunities offered by a growing list of new technologies like WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee and 60GHz to support data streaming, multimedia and internet demands.

This talk will introduce Networked Control Systems (NCS), where feedback loops are closed using wireless data channels. Here regular sampling, synchronised control and non-delayed sensing and actuation do not generally apply. This raises interesting challenges with respect to the unknown and time-varying transmission delays around the loop.

The aim here is to introduce the research issues arising for modelling, analysis and control design, to argue the need for integrated control and communications solutions and to present recent research results.

Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics,
University of Liverpool,
Brownlow Hill, Liverpool
L69 3GJ

Phone: +44 (0)151 794 4535

Henry Wu was appointed to the Chair of Electrical Engineering in 1995, leading the Intelligence Engineering And Automation group at The University of Liverpool. He is also the Director of National Instruments e-Automation Laboratory at Liverpool. He has authored/co-authored more than 350 journal and refereed conference papers on various aspects of Systems Control, Computational Intelligence and Electric Power Systems. Professor Wu is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow of IEE and Senior Member of IEEE. He has served as a committee member of IEE professional groups and on the committees of several international conferences. He has given invited lectures at a number of international conferences and institutions. Professor Wu¹s research interests include Adaptive Control, Computational Intelligence, Non-linear System Control, Mathematical Morphology and Multi-agent Systems, and their applications in electric power systems.

Due to the complexity of modern distributed industrial systems, a conventional automation system is not capable of providing sufficient information management and control with high-level intelligent approaches, as achieving these functionalities requires the support of comprehensive data management and coordination between system devices and heterogenous information. This talk is concerned with a multi-agent based automation platform in which computer networking and intelligent agent technologies are applied to distributed industrial systems, and presents a hardware and software architecture that implements this platform. The open architecture based on multi-agent systems is developed to allow the implementation of diverse tasks of distributed automation systems and to permit greater configurability than can be obtained from a traditional automation system.  The talk also presents a case study of the integration of information management, condition monitoring and control for power system substations.

Imperial College London,
South Kensington Campus,
London
SW7 2AZ

Phone: +44 (0)20 7594 6284      

Paul D. Mitcheson received the MEng degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering in 2001 and the PhD degree in 2005 both from Imperial College London. He is currently a Lecturer at Imperial in the Control and Power Research Group in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department and has research interests in micro-power generators and their associated power electronics.

Paul has published 7 journal papers and 16 conference papers, mainly in the area of power MEMS.  He has recently released an open source toolkit for simulation of energy-harvesting devices.  He has authored or coauthored 3 invited papers, presented 3 invited seminars and given 1 invited tutorial.

Vibration energy harvesting devices is a research topic which is still increasing in popularity.  This is unsurprising because the potential applications for such devices are many and varied, ranging from medical health sensors to industrial machine monitoring.

The challenge of realising sucessful energy-harvesting devices is not just in the design of the electro-mechanical MEMS or other miniature device, but also in the design and optimisation of the complete harvesting system, including the associated generator electronics.

In this talk, I will cover some the basic operation of some different types of micro-generators, including vibrational and rotational ones, and look at the analysis and optimisation of such systems.  This will include a look at several areas, including MEMS, integrated circuits and multi-domain system modelling.  I will then talk about some of the requirements in terms of the application of control in the MEMS area and persuade you that MEMS offers an excellent platform for the application of control techniques!

Department of History & Economic History
Manchester Metropolitan University
Geoffrey Manton Building
Rosamond Street West
off Oxford Road
Manchester
M15 6LL

Dr Catherine Armstrong is a lecturer in the history department at Manchester Metropolitan University. She had three years experience of job hunting in the U.K. after getting her PhD before being appointed. She has also worked for the online jobs board jobs.ac.uk since 2002. For 18 months jobs.ac.uk has run a career development site adjoined to its main job search site. Catherine was part of the team that created the career development site and she has written numerous articles and white papers for this site as well as having her own blog on the site reflecting her experiences as a newly appointed academic. She has given several careers talks to undergraduates and postgraduates at different universities around the country about going into academia.

This talk will explore the different ways of enhancing your chance of getting an academic job (research or teaching) in a U.K. university. It will track the process from  C.V. building/enhancing, finding jobs to apply for, submitting an application and interview. Advice given will reflect my own personal experience as a recently appointed permanent lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and also my job as careers writer for www.jobs.ac.uk.

Group Head, Control Technology
Technology Services Division
RWE Npower plc.
Windmill Hill Business Park
Whitehill Way
Swindon
SN5 6PB

Ph.D in Adaptive Control from UMIST, Manchester, 1988 and MBA from the Open University, 2003.  Chartered engineer and MIEE.

Joined the Electricity Supply Industry as a Research Officer in 1989 at the Central Electricity Research Laboratories (CERL), Leatherhead. Since privatisation has been with National Power and its successor company RWE npower. Currently, Group Head, Control Technology in the Technology Services Division of RWE npower. Areas of interest include applications of advance control and AI technologies to power plants.

Member of the IFAC Technical Committee on Power Plants & Power Systems

The environmental concerns and the need for greater deployment of renewable energy as a source of sustainable energy means that there is an expectation of the development of larger windfarms than those currently in existence. Most of the new windfarms are likely to be offshore and typically sized to be hundreds of MW. In addition, a new layer is being added to the system with the establishment of “offshore transmission operators” (OFTOs).  This, the adverse weather conditions, locations of these proposed windfarms, grid code compliance and the vagaries of wind are issues that control systems for such generating plants will have to address.

The presentation will attempt to identify  and detail the challenges that Wind power generation control systems have to contend with.