Control Engineering
Control Engineering is an American monthly trade magazine and website for engineering decision-makers in the control, instrumentation and automation marketplace, published from Illinois — the batch directory lists Downers Grove — and online at controleng.com. Established in 1954 and carrying ISSN 0010-8049, it is one of the foundational publications of industrial automation, serving the engineers who design, integrate and operate the systems that run factories and process plants. Its pages and website cover controllers, drives, control software, industrial networks, sensors, robotics and safety through news, product coverage, feature articles, case studies and opinion. Over seventy years it has survived the consolidation of American business publishing — including an announced closure in 2010 followed within weeks by a rescue acquisition — and remains best known for two industry institutions it created: the Engineers' Choice Awards and the System Integrator of the Year awards.
Established in 1954
Control Engineering was established in 1954 by the Technical Publishing Company, a division of Dun-Donnelley Publishing Corporation within Dun and Bradstreet. The timing placed it at the birth of modern industrial control: relay logic and early electronic controls were giving way to the programmable era, and a growing profession of control engineers needed a journal of its own. The magazine was published monthly from the start, a cadence it has maintained, and was headquartered for many years in Oak Brook, Illinois, in Chicago's western suburbs — the same corridor as its current Illinois base. Its BPA-audited circulation reached 87,000 subscribers as of June 2008, a measure of how large the North American automation engineering audience had become by the late 2000s, and the title's authority made it an acquisition target as publishing consolidated around it.
Ownership: Cahners, Reed, Closure and CFE Media
Cahners Publishing, a predecessor of Reed Business Information, acquired Technical Publishing in 1986, bringing Control Engineering into the same stable that Norman Cahners had founded on the success of Modern Materials Handling. Under Reed the title became a global automation brand, but in April 2010 Reed Business Information announced the magazine's closure as it exited much of its United States trade press. Later that same month, Control Engineering, together with Consulting-Specifying Engineer and Plant Engineering, was acquired by a newly formed company, CFE Media, created to continue the three engineering titles. The pattern — closure announced, then rescue by insiders who believed in the audience — mirrored events at other Cahners-descended publications that year. More recently, award announcements describe Control Engineering and Plant Engineering as part of WTWH Media, reflecting the titles' latest corporate home while their editorial operations and Illinois base continue.
What Control Engineering Covers
The magazine's coverage map is a catalogue of the automation stack. Core topics include controllers — programmable logic controllers, programmable automation controllers and industrial PCs, whose relative merits its back-to-basics coverage regularly helps readers weigh — motors and drives, machine and process safety, and system integration across software, hardware, power supplies and components. Control software coverage spans human-machine interfaces, SCADA and manufacturing execution systems. Process control and discrete control are treated as twin disciplines, alongside industrial networks including fieldbus, Ethernet and wireless, sensors, robotics, input and output systems, and sustainable, green engineering. A long-running tutorial tradition on PID control — the proportional-integral-derivative loops at the heart of process automation, including multi-part series on fixing poorly performing loops and heuristic tuning methods — exemplifies its approach: deep, practical engineering instruction written for working practitioners, not general readers.
An International Family of Editions
At its international height, Control Engineering published six other editions beyond the North American flagship — for Europe, Asia, China, Poland, Russia and the Czech Republic — plus an online edition for the Middle East. That footprint reflected automation's globalisation: the same controller platforms, network standards and integration practices were being deployed in plants on every continent, and multinational engineering firms and suppliers wanted a common technical literature. The international editions adapted the parent title's mix of news, products, features and case studies to regional markets and languages, making Control Engineering less a single magazine than a franchised professional institution for the world's control engineers during the decades when factory automation spread through global manufacturing.
The Engineers' Choice Awards
The Control Engineering Engineers' Choice Awards highlight the best new control, instrumentation and automation products of the year, as chosen by the magazine's print and online subscribers — the engineers who actually specify and use such products. Finalists and winners are announced annually and have consistently ranked among the most-read content on the magazine's website. Because voting rests with practitioners rather than a small judging panel, the awards function as a market signal: products that win have persuaded working engineers, in competitive categories from controllers to software, that they solve real problems. For suppliers, an Engineers' Choice win or finalist place is a credential used in marketing for years; for readers, the annual lists serve as a curated survey of what is new and credible in a crowded automation marketplace.
System Integrator of the Year and the Hall of Fame
The magazine's second institution honours firms rather than products. The System Integrator of the Year awards, run jointly with Plant Engineering since the first competition — whose winner was featured as the cover story of the December 2006 Automation Integrator Guide — annually select three recipients by company size. A panel of publication editors and industry experts reviews entrants in depth against three criteria: technical expertise, business practices and customer satisfaction, supported by detailed project documentation, evidence of client satisfaction including references and letters of commendation, and proof of sound policies for building a skilled workforce. Winners are inducted into the System Integrator Hall of Fame, and a firm must wait four years after winning before it can win again. Recent cycles show the award's prestige: E Tech Group won in 2025 in the large integrator category, having previously won in 2019, and Thermo Systems was named the 2026 winner in the over-forty-million-dollar revenue category, with editor-in-chief Mark Hoske citing its engineering depth and focus on customers' most critical operations.
Editorial Leadership and Voice
Editor-in-chief Mark T. Hoske, who writes under the byline Mark Hoske, has been the magazine's public editorial voice across decades, editing award coverage, integrator features and industry commentary, and articulating the profession's stakes: system integrators and control engineers, he has written, are essential to helping organisations stay reliable, resilient and competitive. The magazine's online operation publishes weekly rankings of its most-clicked articles, a transparency that shows its audience's working concerns in real time — in a typical recent week, readers concentrated on System Integrator of the Year coverage, PID tuning guidance and strategies for integrating information technology and operational technology networks. Regular webcasts, in which system integrators answer audience questions after presentations on topics such as today's PLCs, extend the magazine's tutorial mission into live professional education.
Digital, Print and the Automation Integrator Guide
Control Engineering is available in paper, digital and online versions. The monthly online edition carries several blogs on current automation topics; one long-running blog was written by Paul Grayson, a former DARPA Grand Challenge team leader, covering the people, parts and products of interest to followers of autonomous vehicles, together with his work supporting STEM education through a neighbourhood 4-H technology club — an example of the magazine's willingness to range from the plant floor to the profession's future pipeline. Its Automation Integrator Guide, distributed each December, connects the editorial franchise to a practical directory function, helping end users find integration partners — the same community its awards programme evaluates and celebrates.
Control Engineering Today
More than seventy years after its founding, Control Engineering remains a monthly print, digital and online authority for the automation profession from its Illinois base, now within WTWH Media alongside its longtime sister Plant Engineering. Its subject has only grown in strategic weight: factories and plants now compete on data, flexibility, energy performance and resilience, all of which are control engineering problems. By combining tutorial depth on fundamentals such as PID and controllers, practitioner-voted product awards, rigorously judged integrator honours and daily coverage of networks, robotics and IT and OT convergence, the magazine continues to do what it was founded to do in 1954 — give the engineers who run the world's automated systems a literature worthy of their responsibility.
