3, MAY 1999
Abstract—This paper reports the current situation and future From the viewpoint of control applications, control tech-
directions of control theory and control technology which have nology can assist the existing production system to operate at
been practically applied to Japanese industries. The control the maximum bounds of equipment to produce more profit.
technology committee in the Japanese Society of Instrument and
Control Engineering (SICE) conducted a control technology sur- Furthermore, advances in the information devices make it
vey of Japanese industry in 1995. The committee sent 300 inquiry possible to realize advanced control theory and control tech-
letters to Japanese manufacturing companies and received 110 nology in the control production system. In order to investigate
effective answers which included 150 application examples in the the effects of economic and society changes described above,
practical industries. After the inquiry, the committee visited the the control technology committee in the Japanese Society of
leading companies and interviewed process and control engineers
to discuss their opinions and comments regarding the inquiry. Instrument and Control Engineering (SICE) has carried out
a control technology survey of Japanese industry. The same
Index Terms— Advanced control, control application, control kind of investigation was done in 1989 and the result was
theory, industrial needs, statistics of applications.
announced in the CPC-IV annual meeting in 1991 with much
concern as a result. This time the survey is focused on the
I. INTRODUCTION practical issues of plant equipment investment: how to plan,
how to design, how to implement, how to evaluate and so
I N RECENT years Japanese industries have been on a rocky
road because they are going through several major changes
in their business environment. The first one is a long recession
on. The differences between the previous investigation and
future trends of control theory and techniques have been also
after the bursting of the economic bubble. During this time, investigated.
Japanese businesses suffered and were subsequently compelled
to adjust their employment and investment. The second is the
strong yen in the global business. The U.S. dollar changed II. ACTIVITIES
from 130-yen level to 90-yen level during one year, which
forced Japanese companies to cut their prices and reduce In October 1995, the committee sent 300 inquiry letters
profits. to Japanese manufacturing companies and got 110 effective
To cope with these situations and to survive, industries are answers which included 150 application examples used in
significantly changing their management strategies. Companies industries. After the inquiry, the committee visited the lead-
are restructuring their systems by developing the following ing companies’ plants and interviewed process and control
strategies: to simplify management and decentralization of engineers to discuss with them and get their opinions and
decision making, to move one part of operation from Japan to comments regarding the inquiry.
other countries from the viewpoint of labor and market, to look 1) Inquiry Items: Table I shows the inquiry items inves-
to the future and gain a new market instead of the conventional tigated. The items are classified into three groups: the target
one which may have reached its peak and so on. The utilization plants to be applied at each site, the applied control technology
of information systems is also becoming more essential to and the procedure of control system development, which are
adapt to change. The amount and kind of information available described in the following chapters.
are now growing more and more. Computer network, Internet, 2) Responding Companies and People: Tables II–IV show
multimedia devices are becoming cheaper and more popular, the statistical data as to respondents of the inquiry. Inquiry
which will affect the way to do business. letters were sent to all industrial plants. But most of answers
came from the raw material processing industries such as
metal, refinery, petrochemical, chemical, paper, power plant
and so on. Answers from mechanical material industries were
Manuscript received January 21, 1997; revised December 29, 1997. Rec-
ommended by Editor-in-Chief, M. Spong. few in number. Respondents mainly belong to design, equip-
H. Takatsu is with the Control System Center, Yokogawa Electric Corpo- ment management and production management departments.
ration, 2-9-32 Naka-cho, Musashino-shi, Tokyo 180, Japan. There exists little change during 6 yr in this respect. Answering
T. Itoh is with the Production Technology Division, Mitsubishi Chemical
Corporation, 2-5-2 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100, Japan. engineers have experience of from 10 to 14 yr, or more than
Publisher Item Identifier S 1063-6536(99)03995-0. 20 yr, which shows this time statistical data is reliable.
1063–6536/99$10.00 1999 IEEE
TAKATSU AND ITOH: FUTURE NEEDS FOR CONTROL THEORY IN INDUSTRY 299
TABLE I TABLE II
LIST OFINQUIRY ITEMS RESPONDS
TABLE III
AFFILIATION OF RESPONDING PEOPLE
TABLE IV
EXPERIENCED YEARS OF RESPONDING PEOPLE
TABLE V
III. TARGET PROCESSES TO BE APPLIED APPLICATIONS IN TYPICAL PROCESSES
As to the actual applications at each site, the abstract of
the controlled processes, applied control techniques, scale of
the control loops and so on are listed and categorized. The
major processes where recent control techniques are applied
are written in Table V: mold level control in continuous
casting equipment, steel board thickness control in rolling
mills, component control of distillation columns in refin-
ery/petrochemical processes, paper property control in paper
milling machines, combustion control in exhaust equipment
and so on.
From the viewpoint of control techniques actually operating,
linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG)/H-infinity control are used
300 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 7, NO. 3, MAY 1999
TABLE VI TABLE IX
CONTROL PROBLEMS HARDWARE
TABLE VII
NUMBER OF VARIABLES
control have reached the level of practical use but expectation applications, half of respondents selected yes. Table XI is the
is small. Sliding mode control and nonlinear control do not key factors for failed applications. The top three factors are
reach the level of practical use but with some expectation. the insufficient process analyzes, improper selection of sensors
PID, auto-tuning, and rule-based control are already used but and improper countermeasure to disturbance. Respondents in
the results are not so good as are expected. Optimization steel and metal industries selected the sensor issues as the
control has reached the level of practical use with large top of factors, but fiber and cement industries selected the
expectation. insufficient process analysis as the top factors.
4) Key Factors for Successful and Failed Applications: 5) Surrounding Environments: Table XII is the insufficient
Reasons for successful applications were asked in the environments to support the introduction of control systems in
questionnaire. As is shown in Table X, the top factors for industries. Respondents consider the process modeling, control
successful application are the appropriate selection of control performance evaluation, software productivity, and openness
strategy and control devices. The next are appropriate control of information data/human-machine interface to be the major
specifications, flexible system configuration, and appropriate factors.
emergency countermeasure. On the other hand, when the 6) Application Issues: As common application issues to all
questionnaire asked if they have experienced in failed control techniques, “required engineering power is too high,”
302 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 7, NO. 3, MAY 1999
“there is no need to apply a new control in use,” “benefit V. CONTROL SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT FOR APPLICATION
of a new technique is not clear” obtained high points. As The following is the survey results for control system
to application issues of each control, the modern control
developments from the planning phase to the maintenance
is pointed out to be difficult to apply. Advanced PID is
phase from the viewpoint of control systems life cycle. In order
pointed out not to be enough to cope with disturbances and
to obtain accurate, quantitative and effective data, the method
perturbation of process characteristics. As for fuzzy control,
to select one or two among the given items are applied, which
the lack of proper design and simulation tools are pointed out
and easy-to-use tools are desired. results in a large amount of answers.
7) Issues in the Future: Also asked were future issues of 1) Planning Phase: In order to evaluate how much infor-
control technology as is shown in Table XIII. Many re- mation and knowledge of target processes are required for
spondents say that new needs for control application should control system developments, the inquiry asked who were the
be developed and the education of new control theory and main planners of each development. The response showed
technique should be promoted. Improvement of adaptability that 45% of developments are planned in house, while 28%
of each control is also selected. The issue of control systems are by domestic vendors and 11% are by domestic engineer-
which were selected in the previous survey, are not pointed out ing companies. Overseas vendors and engineering companies
because the control system performance have rapidly improved joined mainly in the oil refinery and petrochemical indus-
since the last survey. tries consulting in 7% of the respondents. The respondents
TAKATSU AND ITOH: FUTURE NEEDS FOR CONTROL THEORY IN INDUSTRY 303
TABLE X TABLE XI
KEY FACTOR FORSUCCESSFUL APPLICATION KEY FACTOR FOR FAILURE
select the “forecast of application benefits” and “modeling” in each control category. Control engineers are combined
as top two issues about which they have a hard time in the with process engineers in order to investigate control designs.
planning phase. Control techniques are roughly categorized into the following:
2) Design Phase: The design members of control projects PID and advanced PID, FAN, model predictive control (MPC)
are mainly their companies (51%) and domestic vendors and modern control theory (LQG, H-infinity etc.). In PID
(32%). Overseas engineering companies are utilized for only and advanced PID and MPC, the ratio of control engineers
3% of oil refinery and petrochemical and chemistry control and process engineers are almost the same, which shows
design projects (3%). Fig. 4 shows the proportion of designers MPC has been already matured in useful software packages
304 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 7, NO. 3, MAY 1999
TABLE XII
INSUFFICIENT CONTROL SYSTEM SUPPORTING FUNCTIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The items discussed above were part of the survey activities.
The survey report consists of the statistical data and analysis
to predict the future needs of control technology in industry.
These will contribute to academic research of control theory
and promote the application of control theory in industries.
The authors wish to thank all the companies and engineers for
their cooperation to this survey.
Fig. 8. The ratio of systems running over 80% during one year after
development. REFERENCES
[1] The current status report of control technologies in Japanese industries,
and resource saving. The merit of quality improvement is report of SICE (96PG0007), SICE (Society of Instrument and Control
larger especially in the steel industry. Engineers), 1996, (in Japanese).
[2] The current status of advanced control systems, their need and fu-
6) Evaluation: The report says the number of systems ture trend, report of JEMIMA, JEMIMA (Japan Electric Measuring
which required a development time of 2–4 man-years and Instrument Manufactories Association), 1990, (in Japanese).
those requiring a development duration of 0.5–1 yr were [3] S. Yamamoto and I. Hashimoto, “Present status and future needs: The
view from Japanese industry,” Y. Arkun and W. H. Ray, Eds., CPC-IV,
both large. The top four technical reasons are in order of 1991, pp. 1–28.
the proper selection of control method, proper selection of
control system, easiness of tuning and proper setting of control
specifications. Fig. 8 shows the number of operating systems
which are running over 80% in each control category. This Haruo Takatsu received the degree from Tokyo
Institute of Technology in 1973.
is large in order of FAN, MPC, PID, and advanced PID and He joined Yokogawa Electric Corporation. He
modern control theory. The fact that the running ratio in FAN is a Control Systems Engineer and General Man-
and MPC is larger than that of advanced PID, will encourage ager with the Application System Center, Yokogawa
Electric Corporation, Tokyo, Japan. He has been
companies who are planning to adopt the up-to-date advanced engaged in the development of control system and
control technologies. On the other hand it was unexpected in control theory and implementation of control algo-
advance that the ratio of PID and advanced PID is lower, rithm.
Dr. Takatsu is a Member of SICE, IEEJ, and JSST
which is the same level as modern control theory. The top in Japan.
three reasons of failure in the whole system development are
listed as sensor issues, disturbance issues and lack of process
analysis. In addition issues of robustness and nonlinearity are
not a major concern. Toshiaki Itoh was born on January 13, 1943. He
received the degree from Kyoto University in 1967.
VI. CONCLUSION He received the Ph.D. degree in process control
technology from Kyoto University in 1997.
The committee has come to the following conclusion as the He joined the Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation in
results of this survey. 1967. He is an Associate Director in the R&D Coor-
dination Department, Mitsubishi Chemical Corpora-
1) The hierarchy of industrial automation has progressed tion, Tokyo, Japan. He has been engaged in process
steadily and continuously during the past decade. As one of control practice, manufacturing system design, and
the key technologies, advanced control techniques have been R&D planning. His main research interest is in
systematic approach for process design and process
more widely applied to many plants than previous survey. control system design.
Many software package tools for process modeling, simulation Dr. Itoh won the Best Paper Award from ISCIE in 1992.