The Impact of Automatic Control on Recent Developments in Transportation and Vehicle Systems

Throughout the field of transportation and vehicle systems control is gaining importance. This report focuses on the current key problems engineers in this field are facing and highlights some major recent accomplishments. The driving forces behind the increasing use of control are the rising need for transportation services and the demand for a higher safety level. While each domain takes specific approach to deal with these demands, a general trend towards automatic co-pilots or even autopilots is visible. In the automotive domain, this is aided by the design of drive by wire systems. In other fields like marine or aerospace systems, the focus of research is on the swarming behavior of multiple vessels. New sensors and networking will also enable more efficient traffic flow control which will allow for a better use of the resource network capacity.Another trend in the vehicle systems sector is the modeling of nonlinear system behavior which is starting to replace look-up tables in real time systems. A forecast on future trends is given at the end of the report.