A reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) is one designed at the outset for rapid change in its structure, as well as its hardware and software components, in order to quickly adjust its production capacity and functionality within a part family in response to sudden market changes or intrinsic system change.
Mustafa Tamer Başar is a control and game theorist who is the Swanlund Endowed Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is also the Director of the Center for Advanced Study.
Michael Athans was a Greek-American control theorist and a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a Fellow of the IEEE (1973) and a Fellow of the AAAS (1977). He was the recipient of numerous awards for his contributions in the field of control theory. A pioneer in the field of control theory, he helped shape modern control theory and spearheaded the field of multivariable control system design and the field of robust control. Athans was a member of the technical staff at Lincoln Laboratory from 1961 to 1964, and a Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty member from 1964 to 1998. Upon retirement, Athans moved to Lisbon, Portugal, where he was an Invited Research Professor in the Institute for Systems and Robotics, Instituto Superior Técnico where he received a honoris causa doctorate from the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa in 2011.
Miroslav Krstić is an American control theorist and Distinguished Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Krstić is also the director of the Center for Control Systems and Dynamics at UCSD and a Senior Associate Vice Chancellor for Research. In the list of eminent researchers in systems and control, he is the youngest.
Masayoshi Tomizuka is a professor in Control Theory in Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley. He holds the Cheryl and John Neerhout, Jr., Distinguished Professorship Chair. Tomizuka received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from Keio University, Tokyo, Japan in 1968 and 1970, and his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in February 1974. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2022.
Naomi Ehrich Leonard is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. She is the director of the Princeton Council on Science and Technology and an associated faculty member in the Program in Applied & Computational Mathematics, Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and the Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology. She is the founding editor of the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems.
Hendrik (Rik) Van Brussel is a Belgian emeritus professor of mechanical engineering of the KU Leuven, world-renowned for his research on robotics, mechatronics and holonic manufacturing systems.
Gábor Stépán, Hungarian professor of applied mechanics, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, fellow of the International Academy for Production Engineering (CIRP), fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), former dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Won the Széchenyi Prize in 2011, the Thomas K. Caughey Dynamics Award in 2015, and the Delay Systems Lifetime Achievements Award in 2021. His research fields include nonlinear vibrations, delay-differential equations, and stability theory. He was elected as a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2017, "for contributions to the theory and analysis of delayed dynamical systems and their applications".
Alper Erturk is a mechanical engineer and the Woodruff Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Panos Antsaklis is the H. Clifford and Evelyn A. Brosey Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame and also Concurrent Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Engineering and of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics. He is a graduate of the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and holds MS and PhD (1977) degrees from Brown University.
Yoram Koren is an Israeli-American academic. He is the James J. Duderstadt Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Manufacturing and the Paul G. Goebel Professor Emeritus of Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Since 2014 he is a distinguished visiting professor at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
Petros A. Ioannou is a Cypriot American Electrical Engineer who made important contributions in Robust Adaptive Control, Vehicle and Traffic Flow Control, and Intelligent Transportation Systems.
Chinedum (Chi) Okwudire is a Nigerian-American mechanical engineer and a professor of Mechanical Engineering and Miller Faculty Scholar at the University of Michigan, where he directs the Smart and Sustainable Automation Research Lab. He is also the founder and chief technology officer of Ulendo Technologies, Inc. His research is in the area of manufacturing automation, control engineering, and mechatronics.
Dawn Marie Tilbury is an American control theorist whose research topics include logic control, networked control systems, robotics, human–machine systems, and autonomous vehicles. She is a professor of mechanical engineering and of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, and the head of the directorate for engineering at the National Science Foundation.
Kon-Well Wang is an American academic and engineer, best known for his research work in structural dynamics, especially in the emerging field of adaptive structures & material systems, with applications in vibration & noise controls. acoustic & elastic wave tailoring, shape morphing & deployment, energy harvesting, structural health monitoring, and vehicle and robotic system dynamics. He is the A. Galip Ulsoy Distinguished University Professor of Engineering and the Stephen P. Timoshenko Professor of Mechanical Engineering (ME) at the University of Michigan (U-M).
Domitilla Del Vecchio is an Italian control theorist, whose research connects control theory to systems biology, synthetic biology, synthetic biological circuits, and regenerative medicine. She has also studied self-organization in traffic control. She is a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a member of the MIT Synthetic Biology Center.
Huei Peng was an American control researcher and the Roger L. McCarthy Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. He made contributions in adaptive control and optimal control, with emphasis on their applications to vehicular and transportation systems, design and control of electrified vehicles, hybrid vehicle drivetrains, and connected and autonomous vehicles. In recognition of his achievements, he was made a fellow of Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). His specific contributions to the application of control theories to ground vehicles includes:
Qing (Cindy) Chang is a Chinese–American production engineer whose research combines control theory and machine learning in smart manufacturing. She is a professor of engineering at the University of Virginia, jointly appointed in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and in the Department of Systems and Information Engineering. She co-chairs the Technical Committee for Sustainable Production Automation of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society.
