Engineering control software systems: A multi-disciplinary challenge

Advancement of computer, software, telecommunication and internet technologies during the last twenty years has fundamentally shifted the focus of the expertise in control-systems engineering (CSE) industry. It is evident that building high-quality modern control systems requires a multi-disciplinary effort as a single engineer simply cannot be an expert in all the related areas, e.g., software/computer engineering, computer science and information systems. As an experience and evidence report, this article reports on the challenges in CSE based on the authors' experience and presents observations and potential recommendations for multi-disciplinary nature of CSE. It is hoped that the article would bring awareness to the community and would be useful for the industrial practitioners and researchers working in this area in building stronger multi-disciplinary CSE teams and, ultimately, in building higher-quality modern control systems.