The National Organizing Committee, on behalf of the American Automatic Control Council, is pleased to host the 13th triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control. Since the first Congress was held in Moscow in 1960, these meetings have come to be recognized as the preeminent events for the worldwide community of researchers and practitioners of control systems science and engineering. While IFAC organizes many conferences on various aspects of automatic control, it is the World Congress where people from the entire broad field get together and where progress in the full spectrum of subjects can be reviewed. Our goal in organizing this Congress has been built on the outstanding efforts of our predecessors and to continue the pattern of ever-increasing quality of papers and of Congress activities. We hope that this Congress will be remembered for our successes in achieving this goal. In particular, we expect several papers to have lasting influence on the directions taken by the field of control systems engineering.

The Technical Program for the Congress covers a broad range of topics with sessions arranged into nine Congress Symposia and subdivided into forty-six Technical Areas. This structure was chosen to conform to the Technical Committee structure of IFAC. Individual papers were selected from a very large submission of more than twenty-five hundred separate offerings received from authors from sixty-four countries around the world. The International Program Committee was impressed by the quality of the submissions and believes that the program that has been selected will provide significant contributions in each of the subject areas of the Congress Symposia.

There is a plenary speaker scheduled at the start of each of the five days of the Congress. The plenary speakers include some of the world's most outstanding authorities in our field. Professor Lotfi Zadeh, the father of fuzzy systems theory and fuzzy logic, will present one of the plenary addresses. Professor Brian Anderson will discuss some fundamental issues of identification, adaptive and nonlinear control. Professor Karl Astrom will bridge theory and practice in his talk on Tuning and Adaptation. Two important application areas have been selected as topics for plenary talks. Hichiro Ido will discuss current issues of plant management and control. The Automated Highway Systems program of the USA will be discussed by William Stevens. In selecting the plenary speakers, we have been guided by a desire to provide perspectives on theoretical topics and on important applications.

Following the plenary addresses, the Congress program composed of approximately fifteen hundred papers will be presented in 204 regular and invited lecture type sessions and in 43 poster type sessions, the latter arranged in six clusters. The paper sessions are supplemented with 13 panel discussion sessions. Many lecture type sessions have been created by a session organizer who has invitedexperts to present reviews and recent results in a focused and coherent topic area. There are fifteen survey papers presented in the lecture type sessions. An innovation in this Congress comes through the use of a poster presentation format in six poster session clusters, containing almost three hundred papers. Important and high quality papers, which are well-suited to poster presentation, have been chosen for the poster sessions and should add an interesting, hopefully intellectually exciting, new dimension to the Congress. There is no distinction between poster papers and lecture type papers in the Proceedings.

For the first time in the history of IFAC, the Proceedings of the Congress is published on Compact Disk. This innovation, which takes advantage of the rapidly growing availabilityof this new technology, is aimed at stemming the inconvenience and inefficiency that has arisen from the increasing physical size of the Proceedings. The Compact Disk is provided to each registered participant, as part of his/her registration material. The CD will laos be marketed after the Congress, as the official Congress Proceedings, by the IFAC Publisher Elsevier Science, Ltd. To facilitate active participation at the Congress sessions, the full text of the papers is available also in printed form. The material is arranged in 17 volumes by subject, following the structure of the technical program. A choice of two of the 17 volumes will be provided for every participant as part of the Congress registration fee. Additional volumes may be purchased for an additional charge. In addition to the volumes containing the papers, there is a Plenary and Index Volume that completes the set of publications provided for the Congress. This volume contains the plenary papers, some of the panel discussions session keynote papers or session summaries, and the Table of Contents, Authors' Index and Subject Index for the full set of Subject Volumes. This volume is also included on the Compact Disk.

It is our hope that every participant, whether a researcher or practicing engineer, will find the Congress a useful and gratifying experience, well serving the purpose of any technical meeting of this kind: the dissemination of knowledge and the exchange of technical ideas and results.

Jose B. Cruz, Jr. Chairman International Program Committee

Harold W. Sorenson Chairman National Organizing Committee