A Challenge for a New Organization in Systems and Control Curricula

The traditional control curricula organization is not adequate for the new generations of students. This paper proposes the challenge to change completely the sequence of traditional control subjects. Firstly it proposes to develop control as a branch of information processing sciences. Paradigms for information are proposed: integral-differential paradigm, data-paradigm, linguistic paradigm. The control curricula in undergraduate education should start by fuzzy control, exploiting heuristics, games, intuition, in order to stimulate the student’s interest for the area. Control may be faced as a branch of machine learning and controllers have learning capabilities that can be classified into a proposed hierarchical structure. One introductory course for systems and one for control are proposed with syllabus oriented by this view.