automatica
M. Hadjiski. Does Automation Become a Routine Engineering Discipline

Key Words: Artificial intelligence; automation; control theory; knowledge.

Abstract. During the second half of the twentieth century Automation was doubtlessly one of the most dominant scientific and engineering directions. In control theory a number of original concepts with a fundamental importance received a quick and deep development – dynamic systems, feedback, stability, modeling, identification, optimization, robustness, controllability and observability. These new concepts rendered a strong interdisciplinary paradigmal impact on a variety of scientific areas of advanced activities – computer science, decision making as well as on classic sciences like neuroscience, psychology, medicine, economics, education and many others. On the other hand contemporary Automation absorbs in a natural way lots of relevant achievements in other scientific directions like the fuzzy logic, the approximation theory, the neural nets, the network approach, learning, elements of the artificial intelligence, etc. But during the last fifteen years there was an obvious decrease of the verbal attendance of the Automation problematics in societal debates about the emerging challenges in a globalizing world. In the present paper it is argued that Automation continues to be a solid reactive and proactive factor in the formation of the societal strategy and in the running advanced technological and scientific policy because: (i) Automation speeds up its internal advanced development solving new emerging problems, (ii) Automation possesses relevant tools to predict corresponding scientific challenges and to Overcome Them, (Iii) Automation Will Be Together With Artificial Intelligence The Most Powerful Action In The Social Digitalization In The Near Future.