History – Department of Automatic Control and Applied Informatics

The beginnings of automatic control engineering at the “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University in Iași (the ’50s)

Control engineering saw rapid development in many countries in the period immediately following the Second World War. Engineers and scientists concerned with control problems have formed new professional groupings and university courses dedicated to this subject have arisen. At the same time, research groups have been set up both in the industrial and in the academic communities.

• The Polytechnic Institute “Gh. Asachi” in Iaşi’s Faculty of Electrotechnics’ Department of Electrical Uses and Automatic Control dealt with automatic control engineering issues. These issues were covered as course sections in the electrification, electroenergetics, and electromechanics departments.
  Thus, the first course in the field, entitled Electrical drives and the theory of automatic adjustment ( Chapter IX Notions of the Theory of Automatic Adjustment ) was an optional course taught by Professor Nicolae Boțan at the Electrifications section, from 1954.
• For the electrification portion, the optional course Automation (L. Sebastian) and the course Basics of Automation and Telemetry (seral) were added in 1957..
• The course Automatizations and Telecoms (L. Sebastian) was introduced in 1961 for the Electromechanics (din 1962, L. Sebastian) and Electroenergetics (from 1962 – I. Bejan) sections.
• Additionally, some chapters in the publications that were released addressed issues related to automatic control engineering: “Transport and Distribution of Electric Energy” , N.V. Boțan, Al. Poeata, Editura I.P., Iași, 1951; “Electric Drive and Electromechanical Equipment of Rolling Bridges” , N.V. Botan, L. Sebastian, Nina Poeată, Editura Technică, Bucharest, 1956.
• 1962 saw the publication of “Electromechanical drives and automations,” the first book in the field of automatic control, by Nicolae Boțan, Ioan Bejan, and Eugen Balaban at Editura Didactica e Pedagogica Bucharest.
• In 1967, Ioan Bejan and Gherghina Balaban published the first course in control, entitled “Automation and Remote Control” at the publishing house of the University of Medicine and Pharmacy “Gr. T. Popa” of Iasi.
• In the 60s and the beginning of the 70s, the course of “Automation and Remote Control” has known a rapid development, e.g. the course “Automatic Control” (Leopold Sebastian) started at the electrical engineering programme and the course “Automation of Electrical Power Systems” (Ioan Bejan) was introduced for the electrical power engineering programme.
• Automatizarea sistemelor electroenergetice, Ed. Didactică și Pedagogică, București.
• New optional courses have also simultaneously appeared for electrical engineering, such as: “Logical Circuits and Sequential Control Systems” (Corneliu Hutanu), “Servomechanisms” (Iosif Olah), “Computer Controlled Processes” (Simona Caba) and “Advanced Automation” (Gherghina Balaban, Iosif Olah and Mihail Voicu).
• Under the supervision of professors Ioan Bejan and Leopold Sebastian extensive research have been carried out at the Department of Electrical Drives ranging from control theory problems (nonlinear systems, identification, adaptive and optimal control, controller tuning) to the application of control methods in the areas of thermal processes, electrical drives, electrical power systems, relays protection systems, servomechanisms or machines tools control.
• The above mentioned professors have initiated PhD positions in Industrial Automation (Leopold Sebastian – 1966) and in Electrical Power System Automation (Ioan Bejan – 1972).
• Two research groups have emerged, headed by Leopold Sebastian for the electrical engineering programme (Eugen Balaban, Corneliu Hutanu, Iosif Olah, Corneliu Botan, Teohari Ganciu and Simona Caba) and Ioan Bejan for the electrical power engineering programme, respectively (Gherghina Balaban, Ioan Titaru, Mihail Voicu, Cristea Pal and Dumitru Asandei).
• In the 70s, several well-known books have been published in Romanian, e.g.: L. Sebastian, “Automatic Control”, Editura didactica si pedagogica, Bucharest, 1975; I. Bejan, “Automation and remote control of electrical power systems”, Editura didactica si pedagogica, Bucharest, 1976; I. Bejan, “Magnetic amplifier for control systems”, Editura Tehnica, Bucharest, 1972; N. V. Botan, “Speed control of electrical drives”, Editura Tehnica, Bucharest, 1974; N. V. Botan, “Electrical drives control”, Editura Tehnica, Bucharest, 1977.
• In the same time period, PhD degrees in the field of automatic control have been obtained by Mihail Voicu, Corneliu Botan, Gherghina Balaban and Iosif Olah, and the Ministry of Education conferred the titles of professor emeritus to Ioan Bejan, Eugen Balaban, Olah Iosif, Nicolae Boțan, Leopold Sebastian, Eugen Balaban, and Gherghina Balaban, as well as the members of the automatic control group.

First Automatic Control Programme (1977 – 1990)

In 1977, a five years programme entitled “Automatic Control and Computers” has been developed within the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. This came as a response to the demands from industry, which began to require well prepared engineers in the fields of control and computer science

• The Electrical Drives Department already had teaching staff and research laboratories in the field of control engineering. The control team elaborated the first Automatic Control curriculum that comprised courses of System theory, Digital control systems, Analogue control systems, System identification, Hydraulic and pneumatic control equipment, Control system design, Systems and equipment for process control and Optimal control.
• In the 80s, the following new areas of research have appeared: flow-invariance in control theory, computer controlled processes, machine vision, pattern recognition, computer aided control engineering and robotics.
• In 1983 professor Hutanu’s book “Digital circuits and sequential control systems” was published at “Junimea” publishing house from Iasi and professor Voicu published an important monograph at “Editura Tehnica”, Bucharest, in 1986, entitled “Stability analysis techniques for control systems”.
• The deep crisis experienced by Romania in the 80s particularly affected higher education and inevitably, also the automatic control teaching staff, which faced serious problems. However, under these severe conditions, 10 papers have still been published in important foreign journals by Voicu, Sebastian, Pastravanu and Ganciu and 9 papers appeared in the proceedings of international conferences.
• Beginning with 1987, the control group formed within the teaching staff of the Electrical Drives Department organised every two years the national scientific symposium “Structures, Algorithms and Equipment for Process Control”.
• In the `80, the control engineering group supported the technology research and development in the field of automation and robotics by fruitful cooperation with research institutes and industrial companies
• In the mid 80s, professor Teohari Ganciu concentrated his efforts on the foundation of the Iasi branch of the “Automation Research Institute” – IPA Bucharest, having as research directions computer-assisted graphics and CAD for machine tools

The Department of Automatic Control and Industrial Informatics (1990-2005)

As a direct consequence of the profound changes experienced by the Romanian nation in 1989, the Romanian higher educational system has known a lively development. The Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Engineering has been founded at the initiative and due to the efforts of the teaching staff from the degree course “Automatic Control and Computers” of the former Electrical Engineering Faculty. From the beginning, the Faculty had two departments, Automatic Control and Industrial Informatics and Computer Science, each of them offering the following degree courses: Automatic Control and Industrial Informatics and Computer Science, respectively.

• The first head of the Automatic Control and Industrial Informatics department, professor Mihail Voicu, together with the department staff began in 1990 to develop a new curriculum in Automatic Control and Industrial Informatics. It must be noted that this curriculum was also influenced by a consultative council of the Automatic Control professors from Romania in order to maintain certain compatibilities between similar curricula introduced in other university centres of the country.
• Starting with the beginning of the 90s, this curriculum has been changed and improved on a yearly basis, also based on the knowledge and the experience of other European universities, with which several contacts have been renewed or new established in the framework of EU programmes. Due to the efforts of Mihail Voicu and Octavian Pastravanu, Tempus Joint European Projects (JEPs) have been developed in collaboration with the Control Engineering departments of other European universities, e.g. JEP 0886/1990 “Higher Education in Control Engineering”, JEP 02011/1991 “Improvement in Automatic Control Technologies”, JEP 07101/1994 “Development in Romania of Short-Term Higher Education in Computing, Centred on Distributed Processing and Its Application”
• The MJEP 11467/1996 “EU Compatible Training in Industrial Automation” – COMPANION included six Automatic Control departments from Romania and four from abroad (Vienna, Duisburg, Sheffield, Ghent) and was coordinated by Mihail Voicu and Octavian Pastravanu.
• The last TEMPUS project of the 90’s, UM-JEP 13133/98 “Quality Management”, has been managed by Alexandru Onea and it has resulted in a significant contribution to the implementation of the quality assurance system of our Faculty.
• Based on Tempus programmes, the “traditional” approach towards teaching has been substantially improved. The European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) was implemented starting with the academic year 1998 – 1999 and the teaching procedures became compatible with similarly oriented universities in the world. This makes possible the exchange of students and academic staff and mutual recognition of study periods and qualifications.
• The European Credit Transfer System formed the basis of future collaborations that continued after the end of the Tempus programme. Thus, with some of the partner universities, the programme Socrates-Erasmus began to grow at the end of the 90s. In the framework of this programme, each year students from our department worked on the diploma project at the following universities: University of Gent (Department of Electrical Energy, Systems & Automation), University of Sheffield (Department of Automatic Control and System Engineering), University of Duisburg (Department of Measurement and Control Engineering), Vienna University of Technology (Department of Robotics), Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble and Université Joseph Fourier (Laboratoire d’Automatique de Grenoble). Within this programme, an important number of MSc and PhD students had also training stages.
• As a consequence of the pro-European orientation of the Romanian Higher Education that appeared immediately after 1990, our department was entitled to offer a master programme – one year of specialization, ensuring further training in the following modern areas of Automatic Control: distributed parameter control systems, parallel programming algorithms and techniques, predictive control, parameter estimation, distributed control, artificial intelligence in control
• Due to the changes that took place in Romania at the beginning of 90s, besides professors Bejan and Sebastian, the professors Voicu, Hutanu, Balaban, Botan and Olah have also received the right to be PhD supervisors in Automatic Control. Thus, new research areas have appeared and a greater number of graduates in Automatic Control have become PhD students, which ultimately led to an increased research activity. As a result of this, the number of scientific works published in journals and at international conferences and congresses has also increased considerably.
• At the end of the 90s, the research groups from the department of Automatic Control and Industrial Informatics merged and they formed the Automatic Control and Applied Informatics (ACAI) Research Centre accredited by Ministry of Education and Research after the evaluation by the National Council for Scientific Research in Higher Education. ACAI Research Centre, managed by professor Mihail Voicu, was designed as an interdisciplinary research centre within the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science and its mission was to fulfil statements of the University and of the Faculty within the field of Systems and Control Engineering by creating and sustaining a world class research group. The main directions of the scientific research have been the following: System Theory, Robotics and CIM, Optimal and Predictive Control, Artificial Intelligence in Process Control, Systems Identification and Fault Detection, Microprocessor Based Control Systems, CAD for Dynamic Systems.
• During 1998 – 2003 the following five major projects have been financed by the World Bank and Romanian Government: System of Integrated Laboratories for Studying CIM (director Mihail Voicu – 216,000 USD), Training Laboratory in the Field of Computer Aided Process Control (director Octavian Pastravanu – 150,000 USD), Laboratory for Electrical Drives Control (director Corneliu Botan – 150,000 USD), Integrated Laboratory for Studying, Designing and Implementation of Digital Structure for Process Control (director Teohari Ganciu – 150,000 USD), Upgrading of the Short Cycle Degree Programme on Automation Equipment (director Alexandru Onea – 35,000 USD). There were also 2 individual projects only for the equipment acquisition: Microprocessor Based Control Systems (director Corneliu Hutanu – 5,000 USD) and Digital Controller for Process Control (director – Corneliu Lazar – 5,000 USD). These funds allowed the development of new laboratories and the update of most of the existent laboratories at our department.
• Based on the experience accumulated from his last TEMPUS project, Alexandru Onea initiated and led other two projects having the same theme, quality assurance in higher education: MATRA project – “Developing the national strategy in the field of quality assurance in higher education in Romania”, financed by EU through the Dutch Government and the Leonardo da Vinci project – “Training in quality management system for information technology in higher education”.
• Since 1991, owing to the initiative of professor Mihail Voicu, the Bulletin of the Polytechnic Institute of Iasi has a new Section dedicated to Automatic Control and Computer Science. This journal (indexed in Zentralblatt data base) allowed the specialists in the automatic control field to point out the results of their scientific research activity.
• System Theory and Engineering was established in 2005 by a group of researchers who had split off from the ACAI Research Centre. This new center’s scientific focus was on artificial intelligence in automatic control, discrete event systems, hybrid systems, and qualitative theory of dynamic systems. The National Council of Scientific Research in Higher Education, or CNCSIS, has designated this centre as a Centre of Excellence.
• Due to his outstanding contributions which are indexed in Zentralblatt fuer Mathematik (41 reviewed papers) and in ISI Web of Knowledge (46 cited papers), professor Mihail Voicu was elected, in 2006, corresponding member of the Romanian Academy. Previously, professor Mihail Voicu was elected corresponding member (in 1999) and full member (in 2004) of the Romanian Academy of Technical Sciences. Since 1998 he is senior member of IEEE (Control Systems Society) and since 2004 he became Great Officer of the Romanian Order “Merit for Teaching”. Also, he has received the “Aurel Vlaicu” prize of the Romanian Academy for the year 1987 (awarded 1990).
• Also, due to their outstanding contributions, Professor Octavian Pastravanu was elected in 2005 corresponding member of the Romanian Academy of Technical Sciences (full member since 2012), and Professor Corneliu Lazar was elected in 2012 corresponding member of the Romanian Academy of Technical Sciences

The Department of Automatic Control and Applied Informatics (2005-2011)

Starting with the Academic year 2005 – 2006 the Romanian higher education adhered to the Bologna process. This supposed that training in Automatic Control should be based on three cycles – Bachelor, Master and Doctorate.

• The Bachelor degree has been established for a period of four years. The main point of the curriculum was to provide the competence to the graduates as the market required for a control engineer.
• The advisory board of teachers in automatic control from Romania deliberated on the competencies of the graduates, leading to a high level of conformity for the Systems Engineering curriculum across all Romanian universities. Following these consultations, the curriculum for the Automatics and Applied Informatics bachelor degree programme was developed, with assistance from a group of seasoned educators in managerial positions within the faculty (Professor Corneliu Lazăr, Vice-Dean for didactic activity) and university (Professor Mihail Voicu, Vice-Rector for teaching activity), coordinated by Doru Pănescu, the Head of Department.
• Taking into consideration the new name of the Bachelor specialisation – namely Automatic Control and Applied Informatics and also the research interest of our staff, starting with October 2005, the name of our department became Department of Automatic Control and Applied Informatics.
• Following requests from Siemens VDO Iasi (Continental Automotive Romania), given the projected development of the automotive industry, Embedded Control Systems – the first Bologna postgraduate master program in the university – was organized in out faculty and managed by our department. The program was designed in collaboration with specialists from the company, it has been accredited and has become operational from the academic year 2008-2009.
• In 2008-2009, as a result of direct contacts of department management represented by the Head of Department Professor Lazar Corneliu with representatives of the Technical University of Eindhoven (TUE), have laid the foundation of the second masters degree in systems engineering, with a curriculum compatible with that of the master’s program Systems and Control offered by the Technical University of Eindhoven in collaboration with the University of Delft and the University of Twente. This research oriented master’s program, which mainly addresses graduates of Bachelor in Automatic Control and Applied Informatics, was accredited both in Romanian and in English, entering into operation in the 2009-2010 academic (teaching in Romanian ) and 2010-2011 (taught in English).
• The numerous contacts with the western universities permitted the change of the national scientific symposium of the Faculty in the International Symposium on Automatic Control and Computer Science organized every two years, namely in 1993 and 1995 and every three years afterwards.
  Since 2010, this scientific event was organized by rotation, with faculties of the University of Craiova and the “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati, at the International Conference on System Theory, Control and Computing, held every year in October, in Sinaia area.
• In 2006-2013, the research conducted in the department was funded under grants awarded by competition and increased the visibility of activities within the scientific community in the field. Such transactions were entered into a total of 25 grants, with the coordinating teachers from Department of Automatic Control and Applied Informatics ( Doru Panescu, Iosif Olah, Letitia Mirea, Corneliu Lazar, Corneliu Botan, Alexandru Onea, Lucian Mastacan, Stefan Dumbrava, Mihaela Matcovschi, Cristina Budaciu, Adrian Burlacu Marius Kloetzer, Mihai Voicu, Octavian Pastravanu).

The Department of Automatic Control and Applied Informatics (sience 2011)

Following 2011, according to Law on National Education Nr 1/2011 the name of the department has been changed to the Department of Automatic Control and Applied Informatics

• Following the university classification and ranking of study programs conducted in 2011 in Romania, based on data on teaching, research and university management in 2006-2010, the ranking of our Bachelor and Master programmes was in the first category (category A), confirming the quality of the research and education in our department.
• Permanent concern to update the curricula of study programmes in Systems Engineering, for their adaptation to the labor market requirements and attract high school graduates to pursue higher education in Systems Engineering were carried out in 2010-2013 under the grant POSDRU/86/1.2/S/63806, entitled “Network of Centers for Developing Study Programs with Flexible Routes and Tools of Teaching at Undergraduate and Master’s Specialization in the Field of Systems Engineering”, responsible partner TUIASI – prof.dr.ing . Mihail Voicu, in partnership with representative departments of automation of technical universities in the country: Technical University of Civil Engineering of Bucharest (beneficiary ), Politehnica University of Bucharest , Technical University of Cluj -Napoca and Politehnica University of Timisoara.
• The grant POSDRU/81/3.2/S/53084 “Increasing Competitiveness of Enterprises Through Training and Specialization of Human Resources in New Technologies, in a Knowledge-Based Society and for Sustainable Development – ComHighTech” – responsible TUIASI partner Prof. Eng. Corneliu Lazar – a total of 21 graduate courses are offered in three areas of interest for the labor market: Advanced Automation, Information Technology and Communications and Knowledge Management. The project has established The Regional Centre for Consultancy and Training Human Resources Iasi (CRCPRU-Is), director Prof. Corneliu Lazar as part of a network of centers organized into departments automation in the partner universities: University Politehnica of Bucharest (beneficiary), Technical University of Cluj-Napoca and Politehnica University of Timisoara.