The technical program of the Congress will feature

• 5 Plenary Lectures
• Regular Paper Sessions (contributed/invited in lecture/poster format)
  
• Special Sessions and Lectures
  (surveys, case studies, benchmark sessions and panel discussions).

All technical activities of the Congress, with the exception of the Plenary Lectures, will be organized in the form of 9 Congress Symposia, each one covering a coherent field within automatic control. The program of each Symposium will be further subdivided into Technical Areas, following the Technical Committee structure of IFAC. The detailed program structure and session arrangement is available from the IFAC FTP Site.

All congress papers have been reviewed and arranged into sessions by the Technical Committees. Some of the sessions contain invited papers while the others are formed of regular (contributed) papers. About 20% of the 1996 IFAC Congress papers will be presented as Poster Papers. The Poster Papers, while adhering to the exact same quality standards as the Oral Papers, have been picked to fit this presentation venue better. Authors will display their results on posters mounted on boards, some may have audiovisual equipment or demonstrations. Authors are expected to be at the site of their posters through the duration of their session to answer any questions. Poster paper manuscripts will appear in full in the Congress Proceedings.

The size of the various Technical areas and Congress Symposia differ significantly. Thus, for scheduling purposes, the sessions have been arranged into 17 tracks of roughly equal size (marked by the capitals A...Q). Each track contains a set of sessions from the same or related Technical Areas. The oral sessions of each track will take place sequentially at the Congress, in the same room throughout the week. Most tracks have a number of associated poster sessions as well. The full material of each track will constitute one of the Subject Volumes, the oral papers appearing in the order of their presentation.

The subjects of the 17 tracks and volumes are (with the covered Technical Areas in parentheses):

A. Robotics, Components and Instruments (1b, 1d)
B. Manufacturing, Social Effects, Infrastructure (1a, 1f, 6all, 4a, 4b, 4e)
C. Control Design I (2a-I)
D. Control Design II, Optimization (2a-II, 2c)
E. Nonlinear Systems I (2b-I)
F. Nonlinear Systems II (2b-II)
G. Education, Robust Control I (4c, 2d-I)
H. Robust Control II, Stochastic Systems (2d-II, 3d)
I. Identification I (3a-I)
J. Identification II, Discrete Event Systems (3a-II, 3c)
K. Adaptive Control (3b)
L. Systems Engineering and Management (5all)
M. Chemical Process Control, Mineral, Metal, Mining (7a, 7b)
N. Fault Detection, Pulp and Paper, Biotechnology (7f, 7c, 7e)
O. Power Plants and Systems, Computer Control (7d, 9all)
P. Aerospace, Transportation Systems (8a, 8e)
Q. Automotive, Marine, Autonomous Vehicles (8b, 8c, 8f)

The complete list of the sessions included in the tracks/volumes, together with their timing, can be found in the Program Tracks/Volume List.