Control system approaches for sustainable development and instability management in the globalization age

The civilization of mankind in the globalization age depends heavily on advanced information technologies emerging from automation and decision expertise and their respective scientific disciplines. The broad area of social systems, being essentially human centred systems, is a cross-, inter- and multi-disciplinary challenge to the control community. Social systems of contemporary civilization are reviewed from the systems science viewpoint and on the grounds of recent developments in control science and technology. Recent developments have emphasised the social responsibility of the control community during the on-going globalization and changes from the Cold-War bipolar world to a unipolar one, on the way to mankind's multi-polar world of the future.