Scilab Textbook Companions [Focus on Education]

The purpose of this column is to announce the availability of computer programs as a companion for the examples in many of the textbooks used in courses for teaching control engineers [1]. The computer programs are written in Scilab, which is free open-source software for numerical computations originally developed at Inria [2] and currently managed by Scilab Enterprises [3]. Scilab is an alternative high-level programming language to Matlab, with similar functionalities such as linear algebra, two- and three-dimensional visualization, optimization, statistics, signal processing, dynamic simulation, and control systems analysis and design.