Control System Professional Suite Provides Powerful, Integrated Tools for Control

March 17, 2003--Control System Professional Suite is a new extensible framework of tightly integrated Mathematica application packages. The suite offers an object-oriented environment for solving the common control problems that arise in engineering, science, economics, and finance.

"More engineers and scientists than ever before employ control ideas in their everyday work, including a substantial percentage of Mathematica users," says Yezabel Dooley, Applications Product Manager at Wolfram Research. "Control experts can benefit from the inherent advantages of Mathematica, while current Mathematica users can apply control tools to their work without having to learn an entirely new system."

The core of the suite is Control System Professional 2, whose more than 150 functions allow users to link built-in control objects together to model their own problems. This package is designed to seamlessly handle interactions between different types of objects, for example, between discrete-time and continuous-time functions. It allows users to switch between the classic or modern control representations through a graphical interface. Mathematica technology provides users with symbolic simplification of control objects, systems, and equations and with a choice of programming paradigms. A more detailed overview of the new features in Control System Professional 2 is available.

The second component of the suite is Advanced Numerical Methods, which was developed by Wolfram Research in collaboration with Biswa Nath Datta, IEEE Fellow and Presidential Research Professor at Northern Illinois University, and Daniil Sarkissian, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Mississippi State University. Advanced Numerical Methods offers a variety of algorithms for each problem, enabling expert users to choose the most appropriate tool for a given task. Given the system data and the user's requirements for accuracy, the package can often select a suitable method automatically. More information on the new features in Advanced Numerical Methods is available.

"Wolfram Research continues to work closely with control researchers on components such as Advanced Numerical Methods that combine expert control methods with Mathematica technology," says Dooley. "Control System Professional Suite is a mechanism for getting the latest advances in control theory to the people who can put them to work."