- Email: [email protected]
Editorial 2012
Journal of Process Control 22 (2012) 1–2
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Journal of Process Control journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jprocont
Editorial 2012
Again good news at the beginning of 2012! The Journal continues to develop very well despite the fact that the impact factor has significantly dropped from 2.2 in 2009 to 1.66 in 2010. This negative trend could be observed by most of the control journals this year. It should not be overemphasized because it relates to only about 10% less citations compared to the previous year. We are not at all concerned by this development given the fact the Journal enjoys a very good reputation in the wider control community. The Editorial Board will continue to sharpen the profile of the Journal. The number of submissions and the number of accepted papers are still increasing. In 2010, there were 367 submissions, up from 324 in 2009. We expect about the same figures for 2011. The highest numbers of submissions come from China, the United States, Iran, India and Taiwan. The average rejection rate in 2010 was 57% which is slightly lower as in previous years, which could be explained by a total of four special issues where carefully selected authors were invited by the Guest Editors to submit their papers. Still, the Editorial Board will carefully monitor the rejection rates to make sure that the quality standards are maintained. The editorial time is about 30 weeks. It takes typically about 11.5 weeks to the first decision of the handling editor. While these figures are very satisfactory and compare well to those of competing journals, the Editorial Board is committed to reduce the editorial time even further. After acceptance, the papers are available electronically after less than 5 weeks. The number of published pages has been above 1300 distributed in 10 issues in 2010, after about 1800 in 2009, which constituted an all-time high and was only due to our efforts to remove a serious back-log which had built up in the years before. As announced in earlier Editorials, special issues will receive more attention in the Journal’s policy. We will continue to publish special issues with extended versions of papers presented at conferences or workshops. The journal version has to present additional original material compared to the conference paper to justify publication. This policy has been recently adopted by all IFAC affiliated journals because most conference papers are available in electronic repositories (such as IFAC’s papers online) and are often even indexed. Consequently, manuscripts will not be published if they present only minor modifications to the conference paper. The second kind of special issue is dedicated to a set of carefully selected papers centred on a certain topic. In 2011, we have published a special issue with selected papers presented during the 2010 CAB/DYCOPS conferences in Leuven, Belgium, two topical special issues on Automation in Mining, Minerals and Metal Processing and on Hierarchical and Distributed Model Predictive Control, as well as the Tom McAvoy Festschrift with a set of high quality papers to honour the previous Editor-in-Chief of the Journal on the occasion
0959-1524/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jprocont.2011.11.004
of his 70th birthday. Again, we would like to repeat our invitation to everyone to suggest a topic and a team of Guest Editors for a Special Issue to the Editor-in-Chief. As every year, the Editors show their appreciation of the numerous reviewers of manuscripts by publishing a complete list of those, who provided their advice on manuscripts submitted to the Journal during the last year. The Editors thank all our reviewers for their services and support to maintain the high level of quality of the Journal. Again, the Editors selected the winner of the JPC Best Referee Award 2011 from the list of reviewers. This year’s choice is Prashant Mhaskar, who is an Associate Professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering holding the Canada Research Chair in Nonlinear and Fault-Tolerant Control and a member of the McMaster Advanced Control Consortium. His broad research interest span control and systems theory, in particular, predictive control, hybrid systems and fault-tolerant control as well as process control applications with an emphasis on plant-wide control, transport-reaction and particulate systems as well as batch processes. Prashant will obtain a certificate and a gratis subscription to the Journal for 1 year. Yaman Arkun of KOC University, Turkey, Dominique Bonvin of EPFL, Switzerland, Richard Braatz at MIT, USA, Furong Gao of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China, Mike Henson of the University of Massachusetts, USA, Joe Qin of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA, Nina Thornhill of Imperial College, London, UK, and D. Zhou of Tsinghua University, China, have agreed to continue serving on the Editorial Board. The Editorial Board will be extended by four colleagues. I-Lung Chien, Professor at the Chemical Engineering Department of the National Taiwan University, Martin Guay, Professor at the Chemical Engineering Department of Queens University, Canada, Zoltan Nagy, Professor for Process Systems Engineering at Loughborough University in the UK, Darci Odloak, Professor at the Chemical Systems Engineering Center of the University of Sao Paolo, Brazil, and Nicolas Petit, Professor at the Centre Automatique et Systèmes of MINES Paris Tech will join the Board as Associate Editors. A warm welcome to all of them! In 2011, 13 control scientists have been elected to become an IFAC Fellow. Three of them have a strong background in process control. In particular, the Fellow Selection Committee elected Edgar H. Bristol for his outstanding contributions to industrial process control, Panagiotis Christofides for his contributions to the analysis and control of nonlinear and distributed parameters processes, and Jay Lee for his important contributions to the theory and practice of model-based predictive control. Among the various awards presented during the IFAC World Congress in Milano Italy, I want to particularly emphasize the
2
Editorial 2012 / Journal of Process Control 22 (2012) 1–2
Journal of Process Control Prize Paper Award which has been presented to the authors of three excellent papers, namely to • Y. Wang, F. Gao, and F.J. Doyle III in the category “surveys” for their paper Survey on iterative learning control, repetitive control, and run-to-run control, published in Volume 19 (2009) on pages 1589–1600; • V. Adetola and M. Guay in the category “theory/methodology” for their paper Integration of real-time optimization and model predictive control published in Volume 20 (2010), on pages 125–133; and to • M. Chèbre, Y. Creff, and N. Petit in the category “applications” for their paper Feedback control and optimization for the production of commercial fuels by blending published in Volume 20 (2010) on pages 441–451. The High Impact Paper Award 2011 has been presented for the first time to a group of authors who are well-known in the process
control community for their contributions to the theory of modelpredictive control and moving horizon estimation. David Q. Mayne, James B. Rawlings, Chris V. Rao and Pierre O. M. Scokaert have been honoured for their seminal paper “Constrained model predictive control: Stability and optimality” published in Automatica in 2000. I would like to congratulate these awardees on behalf of the process control community! Wolfgang Marquardt ∗ RWTH Aachen University, AVT – Process Systems Engineering, 52056 Aachen, Germany ∗ Tel.:
+49 241 80 96712; fax: +49 241 80 92326. E-mail address: [email protected] 22 November 2011
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Journal of Process Control journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jprocont
Editorial 2012
Again good news at the beginning of 2012! The Journal continues to develop very well despite the fact that the impact factor has significantly dropped from 2.2 in 2009 to 1.66 in 2010. This negative trend could be observed by most of the control journals this year. It should not be overemphasized because it relates to only about 10% less citations compared to the previous year. We are not at all concerned by this development given the fact the Journal enjoys a very good reputation in the wider control community. The Editorial Board will continue to sharpen the profile of the Journal. The number of submissions and the number of accepted papers are still increasing. In 2010, there were 367 submissions, up from 324 in 2009. We expect about the same figures for 2011. The highest numbers of submissions come from China, the United States, Iran, India and Taiwan. The average rejection rate in 2010 was 57% which is slightly lower as in previous years, which could be explained by a total of four special issues where carefully selected authors were invited by the Guest Editors to submit their papers. Still, the Editorial Board will carefully monitor the rejection rates to make sure that the quality standards are maintained. The editorial time is about 30 weeks. It takes typically about 11.5 weeks to the first decision of the handling editor. While these figures are very satisfactory and compare well to those of competing journals, the Editorial Board is committed to reduce the editorial time even further. After acceptance, the papers are available electronically after less than 5 weeks. The number of published pages has been above 1300 distributed in 10 issues in 2010, after about 1800 in 2009, which constituted an all-time high and was only due to our efforts to remove a serious back-log which had built up in the years before. As announced in earlier Editorials, special issues will receive more attention in the Journal’s policy. We will continue to publish special issues with extended versions of papers presented at conferences or workshops. The journal version has to present additional original material compared to the conference paper to justify publication. This policy has been recently adopted by all IFAC affiliated journals because most conference papers are available in electronic repositories (such as IFAC’s papers online) and are often even indexed. Consequently, manuscripts will not be published if they present only minor modifications to the conference paper. The second kind of special issue is dedicated to a set of carefully selected papers centred on a certain topic. In 2011, we have published a special issue with selected papers presented during the 2010 CAB/DYCOPS conferences in Leuven, Belgium, two topical special issues on Automation in Mining, Minerals and Metal Processing and on Hierarchical and Distributed Model Predictive Control, as well as the Tom McAvoy Festschrift with a set of high quality papers to honour the previous Editor-in-Chief of the Journal on the occasion
0959-1524/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jprocont.2011.11.004
of his 70th birthday. Again, we would like to repeat our invitation to everyone to suggest a topic and a team of Guest Editors for a Special Issue to the Editor-in-Chief. As every year, the Editors show their appreciation of the numerous reviewers of manuscripts by publishing a complete list of those, who provided their advice on manuscripts submitted to the Journal during the last year. The Editors thank all our reviewers for their services and support to maintain the high level of quality of the Journal. Again, the Editors selected the winner of the JPC Best Referee Award 2011 from the list of reviewers. This year’s choice is Prashant Mhaskar, who is an Associate Professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering holding the Canada Research Chair in Nonlinear and Fault-Tolerant Control and a member of the McMaster Advanced Control Consortium. His broad research interest span control and systems theory, in particular, predictive control, hybrid systems and fault-tolerant control as well as process control applications with an emphasis on plant-wide control, transport-reaction and particulate systems as well as batch processes. Prashant will obtain a certificate and a gratis subscription to the Journal for 1 year. Yaman Arkun of KOC University, Turkey, Dominique Bonvin of EPFL, Switzerland, Richard Braatz at MIT, USA, Furong Gao of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China, Mike Henson of the University of Massachusetts, USA, Joe Qin of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA, Nina Thornhill of Imperial College, London, UK, and D. Zhou of Tsinghua University, China, have agreed to continue serving on the Editorial Board. The Editorial Board will be extended by four colleagues. I-Lung Chien, Professor at the Chemical Engineering Department of the National Taiwan University, Martin Guay, Professor at the Chemical Engineering Department of Queens University, Canada, Zoltan Nagy, Professor for Process Systems Engineering at Loughborough University in the UK, Darci Odloak, Professor at the Chemical Systems Engineering Center of the University of Sao Paolo, Brazil, and Nicolas Petit, Professor at the Centre Automatique et Systèmes of MINES Paris Tech will join the Board as Associate Editors. A warm welcome to all of them! In 2011, 13 control scientists have been elected to become an IFAC Fellow. Three of them have a strong background in process control. In particular, the Fellow Selection Committee elected Edgar H. Bristol for his outstanding contributions to industrial process control, Panagiotis Christofides for his contributions to the analysis and control of nonlinear and distributed parameters processes, and Jay Lee for his important contributions to the theory and practice of model-based predictive control. Among the various awards presented during the IFAC World Congress in Milano Italy, I want to particularly emphasize the
2
Editorial 2012 / Journal of Process Control 22 (2012) 1–2
Journal of Process Control Prize Paper Award which has been presented to the authors of three excellent papers, namely to • Y. Wang, F. Gao, and F.J. Doyle III in the category “surveys” for their paper Survey on iterative learning control, repetitive control, and run-to-run control, published in Volume 19 (2009) on pages 1589–1600; • V. Adetola and M. Guay in the category “theory/methodology” for their paper Integration of real-time optimization and model predictive control published in Volume 20 (2010), on pages 125–133; and to • M. Chèbre, Y. Creff, and N. Petit in the category “applications” for their paper Feedback control and optimization for the production of commercial fuels by blending published in Volume 20 (2010) on pages 441–451. The High Impact Paper Award 2011 has been presented for the first time to a group of authors who are well-known in the process
control community for their contributions to the theory of modelpredictive control and moving horizon estimation. David Q. Mayne, James B. Rawlings, Chris V. Rao and Pierre O. M. Scokaert have been honoured for their seminal paper “Constrained model predictive control: Stability and optimality” published in Automatica in 2000. I would like to congratulate these awardees on behalf of the process control community! Wolfgang Marquardt ∗ RWTH Aachen University, AVT – Process Systems Engineering, 52056 Aachen, Germany ∗ Tel.:
+49 241 80 96712; fax: +49 241 80 92326. E-mail address: [email protected] 22 November 2011