Call for papers

The IFAC World Congress is the largest event in the field of control science and technology, held every three years since 1960. It offers the most up-to-date and complete view of control techniques, with the widest coverage of application fields, and is attended by a worldwide audience of scientists and engineers from academia and industry. The congress program will include papers selected on the highest standard by the IPC, according to the IFAC guidelines, and published in Diamond Open Access in partnership with Elsevier in the IFAC-PapersOnline series, hosted on the ScienceDirect platform.

2nd Call for Papers

Download the PDF versions from here (including the past CFPs).

Areas and Keywords

Contributions to the World Congress are expected to fall in the fields covered by the IFAC Technical Areas. As listed below, the Technical Areas are placed into nine groups, called Coordinating Committees (CCs), and each CC is constructed from Technical Committees (TCs). The details of CC, TCs, and relevant keywords can be found by clicking the name of the corresponding Technical Area.

Technical Areas	Main Themes (click the Technical Aria for details)
Systems and Signals	Modelling, Identification and Signal Processing; Adaptive and Learning Systems; Discrete Event and Hybrid Systems; Stochastic Systems; Networked Systems
Design Methods	Control Design; Linear Control Systems; Non-Linear Control Systems; Optimal Control; Robust Control; Distributed Parameter Systems
Computers, Cognition and Communication	Computers for Control; Computational Intelligence in Control; Telematics: Control via Communication Networks
Mechatronics, Robotics and Components	Mechatronic Systems; Robotics; Human Machine Systems
Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Enterprises	Manufacturing Plant Control; Management and Control in Manufacturing and Logistics; Integration and Interoperability of Enterprise Systems (I2ES); Large Scale Complex Systems
Process and Power Systems	Chemical Process Control; Mining, Mineral and Metal Processing; Power and Energy Systems; Fault Detection, Supervision & Safety of Technical Processes
Transportation and Vehicle Systems	Automotive Control; Marine Systems; Aerospace; Transportation Systems; Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles
Bio- and Ecological Systems	Control in Agriculture; Biological and Medical Systems; Modelling and Control of Environmental Systems; Biosystems and Bioprocesses
Social Systems	Economic, Business, and Financial Systems; Systems and Control for Societal Impact; Control for Smart Cities; Control Education; Technology, Culture and International Stability (TECIS)

Paper Categories

Contributors are invited to prepare and submit high quality original papers within the broad spectrum spanned by the IFAC technical areas.

There are three paper categories for the World Congress:

・Regular papers will have 6 pages length limitation in acceptance. Authors may upload longer manuscript up to a maximum of 8 pages total. However, each page in excess of 6 will incur an additional overlength page charge. At the time of initial submission, regular papers can be up to 8 pages for review. ・Survey papers overviewing a research topic are also most welcome, and 12 pages limitation will apply to such papers in acceptance. Authors may upload longer manuscript up to a maximum of 14 pages total. However, each page in excess of 12 will incur an additional overlength page charge. For initial submission, 14 pages are allowed. ・Discussion papers are introduced to encourage participation especially from industry and from colleagues outside the traditional academic control community. Such papers should be submitted in the form of extended abstracts typically between 2 and 4 pages in length, and the congress will accept a limited number of them based on ad hoc peer reviews. Authors will present their contribution in oral or interactive sessions. Discussion papers will appear only in the congress preprints, not in the congress proceedings.

Submission Categories

Regular contributions presenting theoretical or application driven research with main focus on the theoretical or methodological contribution as well as application papers presenting research with main focus on concrete contributions to industrial, economics, or social fields.
Invited contributions refer to papers to be part of invited sessions, where the contributors are invited by the organizers. Each invited session is limited to consist of six papers and the organizers must prepare and submit a proposal in advance. The topics should fall within the scope of the congress and address specific well-defined issues. For more details, see here.
Open invited track contributions are to be part of open invited tracks. Such tracks have no limit on the number of papers, and organizers are expected to solicit contributions, and the track proposals are listed on the IFAC WC 2023 website leaving open the possibility for anyone to contribute. For more details, see here.
Demonstrator contributions are for promoting and showcasing research or education-oriented devices, innovative prototypes and transferring technologies to the enterprise. For more details, see here.
Dissemination contributions provide opportunities to authors whose papers have been recently accepted by IFAC journals to showcase their results to a broader audience at the IFAC World Congress. For more details, see here.

Oral, Interactive, and Demonstrators Sessions

The presentations will have two formats: lecture/oral sessions and interactive sessions. No value ranking is implied by the presentation format and all the papers undergo the same review process. It is at the discretion of the IPC to choose which papers are presented in either oral or interactive sessions. Presentations of demonstrator papers will take place separately.

The lecture/oral presentation consists in a talk with a time window of 20 minutes in a conference room with a screen projector. 40 minutes will be allotted for survey papers.
The interactive presentation will take place during 2-hour session slots. The details for such sessions will be provided in due course.
Demonstrator papers will be presented either at interactive sessions (for video or software demonstrators) or the demonstrators session to be held at the exhibition hall of the venue. Demonstrator category submissions should be accompanied with a concise description of the required space and the required material.

Pre-Congress Workshops and Tutorials

You are invited to submit a proposal for the pre-congress workshops and tutorials, which will inform participants about the state of the art in specific areas of interest to the IFAC community. These can be half-day, one-day or two-days sessions. Detailed information is available here.

Submission Instructions

Papers and all other proposals must be submitted electronically using the IFAC PaperPlaza conference manuscript management system: www.ifac.papercept.net. All submissions must be in PDF format, written in English, and prepared according to IFAC format, see: ifac.papercept.net/conferences/support/support.php. The submission procedure is described in detail here.

IFAC Journals

Subsequent derivative publication may be based on the already published IFAC event article, but must in itself satisfy all the requirements of an original contribution to the literature, as prescribed by the journal to which the paper is submitted. Whenever a derivative journal publication does eventuate then this journal paper must contain an appropriate reference to the already published IFAC-PapersOnline publication. The IPC of the IFAC World Congress may screen presented papers with the purpose of recommending the authors to consider a derivative publication of the presented paper in one of the IFAC Journals (at present: Automatica, Control Engineering Practice, Annual Reviews in Control, Journal of Process Control, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Mechatronics, Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems, and IFAC Journal of Systems and Control).

Preprints, Proceedings & Copyright Conditions

Preprints, proceedings and copyright conditions are as requested by IFAC. For details, see here.

"All publication material submitted for presentation at an IFAC-sponsored meeting (Congress, Symposium, Conference, Workshop) must be original and hence cannot be already published, nor can it be under review elsewhere. The authors take responsibility for the material that has been submitted. IFAC-sponsored conferences will abide by the highest standard of ethical behavior in the review process as explained on the Elsevier webpage, and the authors will abide by the IFAC publication ethics guidelines.

Accepted papers that have been presented at an IFAC meeting will be published in the proceedings of the event using the open-access IFAC-PapersOnLine series hosted on ScienceDirect. To this end, the author(s) must grant exclusive publishing rights to IFAC under a Creative Commons license when they submit the final version of the paper. The copyright belongs to the authors, who have the right to share the paper in the same terms allowed by the end user license, and retain all patent, trademark and other intellectual property rights (including research data)."

Submission: General Information		Details of Some Categories
Call for Papers		Invited Sessions & Invited Open Tracks
Important Dates		List of Open Invited Tracks
Submit a Contribution		Demonstrator Papers
Call for Workshops & Tutorials		Dissemination Papers