Computers in Automatic Control Systems

Modern automatic feedback-control systems are making increasing use of electronic computers as active controllers. The trend from the use of simple electric circuits and elementary analog devices toward high-speed digital computers (or computers employing both digital and analog devices) is accelerated by 1) the rapidly growing complexity of modern control systems; 2) the increasing importance of self-adaptive control; and 3) the development of optimizing control. Recent applications of computer control include the automatic control of boiler operation in an electric generating station, the adaptive autopilots for piloted aircraft, and the automatic control of load dispatching in electric power distribution.