Control system approaches for sustainable development and instability management in the globalization age

Mankind civilization in the globalization age depends heavily on advanced information technologies resulting from automation of control and decision expertise and their respective scientific disciplines. These have a multitude of impacts on development of national economies within the global economy. The broad area of social systems, being essentially human centred systems, is a cross-, interand multi-disciplinary challenge to control community. Social systems in modern civilization, currently undergoing globalization, are reviewed from the systems science viewpoint and on the grounds of recent developments in control science and technology. Recent developments put new emphasis on the social responsibility of the control and automation field during the ongoing changes from the cold-war bipolar world to a unipolar one on the way to mankind’s multi-polar world of the future. The focus should be on innovative systems approaches, employing new paradigms, to combined knowledge and technology transfer world-wide, that may remedy some of the negative aspects of globalization. Copyright © 2005 IFAC