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  Jacques Richalet receives the Nordic Process Control Award

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The Nordic Process Control Award is awarded for lasting and significant

contributions to the field of process control. The ninth recipient of

this award is Dr. Jacques Richalet from France who is widely regarded

as the "grandfather" of model predictive control.



The award was presented to Dr. Richalet on August 23, 2007 during

the 14th Nordic Process Control Workshop held in Espoo, Finland.  The

title of his inspiring award lecture was "Origin and industrial 

application of predictive control".  His first industrial application of 

model predictive control was in 1973. He mentioned that it took 3 years 

to get his classic paper on MPC published, and when it was it was 

finally published in Automatica in 1978, this was

apparently against the advice of the majority of the reviewers.



The previous recipients of this award are Howard H. Rosenbrock (1995),

Karl Johan Astrom (1997), F. Greg Shinskey (1998), Jens G. Balchen 

(2000), Charles Cutler (2001), Roger Sargent (2003), Ernst Gilles (2004) 

and Manfred Morari (2006).  The award is awarded by the Nordic Working 

Group on Process Control.



For more information about the award lecture and  the working group see:

www.nt.ntnu.no/users/skoge/npc.html



Contributed by: Sigurd Skogestad, Norway