The continuous increase in the complexity of modern industrial systems and objects as well as growing reliability demands regarding their operation and control quality are serious challenges for further development of the theory and practice of control and technical diagnostics. Early detection of faults is critical in avoiding performance degradation and damage to machinery or human life.

The SAFEPROCESS symposium is a triennial meeting of IFAC and a major international gathering of leading experts in the academia and industry from all over the world. It aims at strengthening the contact between the academia and industry to build up new networks and cultivate existing relations. High-level speakers will give talks on a wide spectrum of topics related to fault diagnosis, process supervision, safety monitoring and fault-tolerant control as well as state-of-the-art applications and emerging research directions. The symposium is also meant as a forum for young researchers, with the opportunity to present their scientific ambitions and work to an audience of international communities of technical diagnostics and control.

Fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control have developed into a major research area at the intersection of system and control engineering, applied mathematics and statistics or soft computing as well as application fields such as mechanical, electrical, chemical and aerospace engineering. IFAC is recognized as playing a crucial role in this aspect by launching a triennial symposium dedicated to this subject.

SAFEPROCESS 2018 is continuing the successful series of symposia held in Baden-Baden (Germany, 1991), Helsinki (Finland, 1994), Hull (UK, 1997), Budapest (Hungary, 2000), Washington DC (USA, 2003), Beijing (China, 2006), Barcelona (Spain, 2009), Mexico City (Mexico, 2012), and Paris (France, 2015).

Topics

  • Model-based diagnosis of linear, nonlinear and hybrid systems
  • Data-driven diagnosis methods
  • Process supervision
  • Active fault diagnosis methods
  • Condition monitoring, maintenance engineering
  • Safety and security of cyber-physical systems
  • Prognosis
  • Fault-tolerant control, control reconfiguration
  • Diagnosis and fault-tolerant control of discrete-event systems
  • Structural methods of fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control
  • Statistical methods for fault diagnosis
  • Statistical methods for reliability and safety
  • Interval methods, numerical methods
  • Soft computing methods for fault diagnosis
  • Neural and fuzzy methods
  • Safety-critical systems
  • Structural health monitoring

Application areas

  • Aeronautics and aerospace systems
  • Automotive applications
  • Electrical, mechanical and mechatronic systems
  • Chemical systems
  • Mining, minerals, metal applications
  • Networked systems
  • Process engineering applications
  • Biosystems
  • Production systems
  • Marine systems
  • Power systems and networks
  • Robotics