About Control and Decision

Control and Decision

Overview and identity

Control and Decision (Chinese: 控制与决策; pinyin: Kongzhi yu Juece) is a Chinese-language control journal published in Shenyang by Northeastern University. Founded in 1986, it carries ISSN 1001-0920, is published monthly, and covers decision making and control, systems optimisation, intelligent systems and management engineering. It is a Chinese core journal in automation, with an SCImago h-index of 54 recorded in recent listings, and it has been honoured repeatedly in China's university-journal evaluations, including selection in 2022 as an 'Outstanding Science and Technology Journal' of Chinese universities.

The title joins two ideas that engineering often separates: control — the regulation of dynamic systems — and decision — the choice among alternatives under objectives and constraints. Modern automation needs both at once: a plant is controlled minute by minute and decided about at every level above that. A journal founded in 1986 in one of China's great industrial universities to publish the two together was early to a synthesis the whole field has since adopted.

History and founding

The journal was founded in 1986 at Northeastern University in Shenyang, Liaoning — a university founded in 1923 with deep roots in China's heavy industry, located in the industrial heartland of the northeast. The journal grew from the university's automation and systems engineering strength, which also made Northeastern a national centre for control science and for the management-engineering disciplines the journal covers.

Its subsequent record is one of accumulating national recognition. Northeastern University's own reporting records that Control and Decision was named among the 'Top 100 Science and Technology Journals of Chinese Universities' three consecutive times before being elevated in 2022 to 'Outstanding Science and Technology Journal' — one of only 30 so honoured, and 15 Chinese-language titles among them, from more than 1,600 university journals. The journal's own site records further honours including '100 Outstanding Chinese Academic Journals' and 'China's Most Internationally Influential Academic Journals'.

Publisher: Northeastern University, Shenyang

Northeastern University is the journal's sponsor and publisher, and the journal is edited within the university's control-science community — the same academic environment that also produces the separate English-language Journal of Control and Decision (founded 2014 with Taylor & Francis), a distinct publication that testifies to the depth of the university's ambitions in this field.

Shenyang matters to the journal's identity. China's northeast was the cradle of its heavy industry — steel, machinery, power equipment — and its automation problems were the journal's first laboratory. A control-and-decision journal in Shenyang publishes for the industries around it as naturally as for the academy, and its management-engineering strand speaks to the region's great industrial enterprises.

Scope: control and systems optimisation

The journal's control scope covers the theory and method of controlling dynamic systems — analysis, synthesis, optimisation of control, and the systems optimisation that generalises control into the allocation of resources and the scheduling of operations. SCImago categorises it across artificial intelligence, control and optimisation, control and systems engineering and software, all in the third quartile in recent listings.

Optimisation is the hinge of the journal's title: control is optimisation over time, decision is optimisation over alternatives, and the journal publishes the shared mathematics — dynamic programming's descendants, modern heuristic and intelligent optimisation, model-predictive methods — that serves both. Few journals occupy that hinge deliberately; Control and Decision has done so since 1986.

Scope: decision making, intelligent systems and management engineering

The decision half of the scope covers decision theory and method, intelligent systems — the AI methods, from expert systems to modern learning, applied to control and decision — and management engineering: the application of systems and decision methods to the management of enterprises and operations, a discipline in which Northeastern University has historic strength.

This breadth gives the journal a distinctive readership bridge: control engineers read it for control, operations researchers and management scientists for decision. Its contents model the reality of industrial systems, in which a production line is simultaneously a control problem, a scheduling problem and a management problem — and is best published, as here, in one place.

Indexing and metrics

International services record Kongzhi yu Juece / Control and Decision, ISSN 1001-0920, publisher Northeastern University (rendered 'Northeast University' in some listings), with Scopus coverage from 1997, an h-index of 54, SJR around 0.34 and a recorded 2025 impact factor of about 1.85 in journal-metric services — the strongest metric profile among the Chinese-language control journals in this batch.

The journal is indexed in Scopus, is a Chinese core journal in automation, and publishes monthly in Chinese with English abstracts. Its journal site, kzyjc.org, presents its honours and its standing: core impact factors and comprehensive evaluation indicators 'firmly in the forefront of the discipline', in its own summary, with repeated selection as a representative Chinese academic journal.

Honours and standing

The journal's honours deserve a section of their own because they are unusually well documented. Beyond the 2022 'Outstanding Science and Technology Journal' award and three consecutive 'Top 100' selections in the Chinese university-journal demonstration evaluations, its recorded titles include '100 Outstanding Chinese Academic Journals' and 'China's Most Internationally Influential Academic Journals' — national honours assessed, per the university's account, on the journal's domestic standing, dissemination and international influence.

Such honours are the Chinese system's way of certifying what metrics suggest: that this is one of the leading Chinese-language journals in its field. For directory purposes they give Control and Decision a verified distinction few titles in this rollout can match — a university journal from Shenyang recognised at the top level of its national class.

Readership and authors

Readers are control engineers, decision scientists, operations researchers and management engineers, in universities and in the industrial enterprises of the northeast and beyond. The journal serves both the mathematically minded — its theory is rigorous — and the application-minded, through its management-engineering and intelligent-systems content.

Authors are drawn nationally from the control and management disciplines, with Northeastern University's own large community — control science, systems engineering, management — at the centre. The university's separate English journal in the same field, launched in 2014, shows the same community publishing for two audiences; the Chinese monthly remains its journal of record at home.

Place in Chinese engineering publishing

Founded in 1986 at Northeastern University, monthly, core-listed, Scopus-indexed with an h-index above 50 and decorated with the university-journal system's highest honours, Control and Decision is one of the most distinguished Chinese-language journals in automation. Its synthesis of control with decision and management gives it a profile no other title in this batch duplicates.

In the WorldNM directory it is profiled as a Shenyang-based Chinese-language magazine-category journal — and as one of the batch's clearest examples of a university journal achieving national leadership in its field.

Northeastern University's account of the 2022 honour adds the criteria by which the journal was judged: the journal's honours within China, its dissemination and utilisation, and its international influence, assessed across more than 1,600 candidate university journals. That a Chinese-language control journal from Shenyang scored at the highest level on international influence as well as domestic standing reflects its Scopus presence since 1997 and the citedness — h-index 54 — that the international services record for it. The honours and the metrics corroborate each other, which is why this profile can state the journal's leading position with confidence.