Groupe des Ecoles des Mines - Department of Automatic Control & Industrial Engineering

The Department conducts research in two main areas :
 Automatic control : design, supervision, control and regulation of automated systems ;
 Industrial Engineering : design, planning, scheduling, optimization, and evaluation of logistics and production systems.
Research is performed within the framework of IRCCyN, the research Institute in Communications and Cybernetics of Nantes, a joint research institute with the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), the Ecole Centrale de Nantes and the Université de Nantes.

The main areas of research are the following :

AUTOMATIC CONTROL

Dynamic systems and their applications:
Modelling and control of flexible robots, telerobotics, control of linear systems under uncertainty, structural analysis of differential systems, infinite-dimension linear systems and systems with delay, analysis and control of discrete event systems, control and supervision of hybrid systems.
The main application concern telerobotics, active control of mechanical systems (robotics, automotive control, vibration control, high-velocity web transport, etc.) and robust control of electrical systems (active filtering, induction motor, etc.).

INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING

Production planning and scheduling: single and multi-machine scheduling problems, scheduling problems for complex workshops, coordination and consistency of production planning and scheduling decisions, lot-sizing, workforce scheduling.
Logistics and transport systems: strategic planning of industrial and logistics systems, location problems, planning and optimization of multimodal and combined transport systems, vehicle routing and scheduling.
Evaluation of systems performance: discrete Petri nets, mixed (discrete and continuous) Petri nets.
Quality and systems reliability: optimization of systems reliability and maintenance to improve safety and security, statistical methods in quality control.

Director : Pierre DEJAX

Staff (as of) 31/12/02): 46, including 19 academic faculty and 20 doctoral candidates.