About Control Theory & Applications

Control Theory & Applications

Overview and identity

Control Theory & Applications (Chinese: 控制理论与应用; pinyin: Kongzhi Lilun yu Yingyong) is a Chinese-language control journal published in Guangzhou, sponsored jointly by South China University of Technology and the Institute of Systems Science — now part of the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science — of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Founded in 1984, it carries ISSN 1000-8152, is supervised by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, is published monthly, and publishes research on control theory, system identification, intelligent control, robotics and industrial automation, with English abstracts.

Control theory is the mathematics of making systems behave: of feedback, stability and regulation in everything from a chemical plant to a spacecraft. It is one of the most mathematical of the engineering sciences and one of the most consequential. This journal, published since 1984 by a leading technical university together with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' systems-science institute, is one of the principal Chinese-language venues of that science.

History and founding

The journal was established in 1984, as China's control-science community — built up since the 1950s in the tradition of Qian Xuesen's engineering cybernetics — was expanding its publication system in the reform era. The joint sponsorship joined the two kinds of institution that make Chinese control science: a great engineering university in the south, South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, and the Academy of Sciences' systems-science institute in Beijing.

The journal has been published continuously since, and is now monthly in A4 format, publicly distributed domestically and internationally, as the university's own description records. Its scope has widened with the field: from classical and modern control theory through the intelligent-control era to today's work on networked control, machine learning for control, and control applications in aerospace and emerging industries, as its publisher's summary describes.

Sponsors: South China University of Technology and the Academy of Sciences

South China University of Technology (SCUT) in Guangzhou is one of China's leading engineering universities, strong in automation and control; the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, heir to the Institute of Systems Science, is the national centre for mathematical systems research. Their joint sponsorship, under the supervision of the Ministry of Education, gives the journal both an engineering school and a mathematics institute as parents.

That dual parentage is the journal's character in institutional form. Control theory lives exactly at the junction of mathematics and engineering, and a journal sponsored from both sides of the junction can hold its theory and its applications to equally high standards — a design the journal's contents, theoretical in method and practical in aim, bear out.

Scope: control theory and systems science

The journal's own statement of scope centres on theoretical research with novel concepts in system control science: modelling of systems, stability and analysis of linear and nonlinear systems, optimal and robust control, adaptive control, and the mathematical methods — including system identification, the discipline of building models from data — on which all of it rests.

System identification, named in the journal's remit from the candidate record, deserves emphasis: before a system can be controlled it must be modelled, and identifying models from measured data is where control theory meets statistics and signal processing. Papers in this strand serve every application the journal covers, from process plants to robots, because every controller begins as an identified model.

Scope: intelligent control, robotics and automation

The applied half of the scope covers intelligent control — fuzzy, neural and learning-based methods — robotics, and industrial automation, together with the application of advanced control theory in practical systems, which the publisher lists as a key coverage area. The journal reports applications in high-tech fields and in the technological upgrading of national economic sectors, in its sponsor's words.

Robotics is the natural meeting point of the journal's halves: a robot is a controlled mechanical system whose theory — dynamics, trajectory control, force control, coordination — is control theory embodied. The journal's coverage of robotics and automation connects its Guangzhou engineering base to the manufacturing industries of the Pearl River Delta, China's great factory region, where automation research has immediate industrial readers.

Indexing and metrics

International services record Kongzhi Lilun yu Yingyong / Control Theory and Applications, ISSN 1000-8152, publisher South China University of Technology, active in indexes from 1993 to the present, with a recorded impact factor of about 1.15 in 2025 journal-metric listings. The journal publishes in Chinese with English abstracts, following the standard that makes its contents retrievable internationally.

Within China the journal is an established core title in automation and control. Its monthly frequency — confirmed by its sponsor's description — and its four-decade run place it among the senior Chinese control journals, in the company of the field's other long-standing titles in this batch, Control and Decision and Information and Control, with which it is naturally compared.

Publication pattern

The journal is published monthly in A4 format and distributed publicly at home and abroad, per its sponsor's official description. Monthly publication over four decades implies a deep submission flow from China's large control-science community — universities, academy institutes and the automation industry — and an editorial office at SCUT scaled to sustain it.

Its articles follow the field's conventions: mathematical development with proofs where theory is claimed, simulation and experimental validation where application is claimed, Chinese full text with English abstract. The journal also serves its community with the standard apparatus of a national title — calls, reviews and the reporting of the field's directions as its editors perceive them.

Readership and authors

Readers are control theorists and automation engineers: university researchers in control science and engineering, institute scientists, and the advanced practitioners who design control systems for process industries, robotics and aerospace. The journal's level is research — it is read by the people who write the field's papers and train its doctoral students.

Authorship is national, drawn from the control groups of China's engineering universities and the Academy of Sciences system, with the SCUT and Guangzhou community at its heart. For a directory reader, the journal's author base is a map of Chinese control science itself, one of the mathematical engineering fields in which China is a world-scale producer of research.

Place in Chinese engineering publishing

Established in 1984, monthly, and jointly sponsored by South China University of Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences' systems-science institute, Control Theory & Applications is one of the established pillars of Chinese control publishing — the Guangzhou pillar of a field whose other pillars stand in Shenyang and elsewhere in this batch.

In the WorldNM directory it is profiled as a Guangzhou-based Chinese-language magazine-category journal. Its dual university–academy sponsorship and its forty-year run make it a model of the Chinese specialist journal at its most durable.

The publisher's own summary adds a detail that captures the journal's self-understanding: it exists, SCUT records, as a platform for scientists and engineers in the control field to exchange the latest research outcomes, with particular attention to emerging issues, original methodologies and cutting-edge technologies in systems control, optimisation and automation. That triad — emergence, originality, exchange — is the working brief of a research journal, and the journal's monthly persistence since 1984, through the field's successive waves from classical control to learning-based methods, is the evidence that its Guangzhou editors have kept it.