Alternative titles: control; monitoring

Control system, means by which a variable quantity or set of variable quantities is

made to conform to a prescribed norm. It either holds the values of the controlled
quantities constant or causes them to vary in a prescribed way. A control system may
be operated by electricity, by mechanical means, by fluid pressure (liquid or gas), or
by a combination of means. When a computer is involved in the control circuit, it is
usually more convenient to operate all of the control systems electrically, although
intermixtures are fairly common.

Development of control systems.

Control systems are intimately related to the concept of automation, but the two
fundamental types of control systems, feedforward and feedback, have classic
ancestry. The loom invented by Joseph Jacquard of France in 1801 is an early
example of feedforward; a set of punched cards programmed the patterns woven by
the loom; no information from the process was used to correct the machines
operation. Similar feedforward control was incorporated in a number of machine
tools invented in the 19th century, in which a cutting tool followed the shape of a
model.
Feedback control, in which information from the process is used to correct a
machines operation, has an even older history. Roman engineers maintained water
levels for their aqueduct system by means of floating valves that opened and closed
at appropriate levels. The Dutch windmill of the 17th century was kept facing the
wind by the action of an auxiliary vane that moved the entire upper part of the mill.
The most famous example from the Industrial Revolution is James Watts flyball
governor of 1769, a device that regulated steam flow to a steam engine to maintain
constant engine speed despite a changing load.
The first theoretical analysis of a control system, which presented a differentialequation model of the Watt governor, was published by James Clerk Maxwell, the
Scottish physicist, in the 19th century. Maxwells work was soon generalized
and control theory developed by a number of contributions, including a notable study
of the automatic steering system of the U.S. battleship New Mexico, published in
1922. The 1930s saw the development of electrical feedback in long-distance
telephone amplifiers and of the general theory of the servomechanism, by which a

small amount of power controls a very large amount and makes automatic
corrections. The pneumatic controller, basic to the development of early automated
systems in the chemical and petroleum industries, and the analogue computer
followed. All of these developments formed the basis for elaboration of controlsystem theory and applications during World War II, such as anti-aircraft batteries
and fire-control systems.
Most of the theoretical studies as well as the practical systems up to World War II
were single-loopi.e., they involved merely feedback from a single point and
correction from a single point. In the 1950s the potential of multiple-loop systems
came under investigation. In these systems feedback could be initiated at more than
one point in a process and corrections made from more than one point. The
introduction of analogue- and digital-computing equipment opened the way for much
greater complexity in automatic-control theory, an advance since labelled modern
control to distinguish it from the older, simpler, classical control.