The Department of Automatic Control at Lund Institute of Technology was funded in 1965 when Karl J. Åström was appointed as its first professor. Since then, the department has established an worldwide reputation in research, education, and industrial applications. There are today 8 professors, including Åström, who is still active as emeritus. A sign of recognition is that three of the professors are Fellows of IEEE. There are in total 35 employees at the department, including 19 PhD-students. Since 1970 we have had 61 PhD dissertations.

The research of the department covers several areas with strong mutual interaction. 1) Nonlinear and uncertain systems are studied with an emphasis of theoretical understanding and computational tools. The collaboration with colleagues at MIT and Caltech is active in this area. 2) Modeling and simulation is a second area which has been a major research focus for several decades. The research has has resulted in several commercial software tools for simulation and system identification. The work on languages and software for object-oriented modeling was instrumental for the creation of the Modelica modeling language, supported by an increasing number of of universities and industries world-wide. 3) Research in Process control is performed in cooperation with industrial partners, particularly for paper-and-pulp applications. 4) Robotics is considered in cooperation with colleagues in computer science and image analysis, for example studying force control in robots. 5) Last but not least, there is a strong activity devoted to Real-time control, with strong relations to the subject of this project application. In particular, scheduling problems and time-delays in control over communication networks is studied, with partial funding from Ericsson.