IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Information for Authors

ENGINEERING is published quarterly.Automation plays an increasingly important role in the global economy and in our daily lives.Engineers strive to combine automated devices with mathematical and organizational tools to create complex systems for a rapidly expanding range of applications and human activities.To meet these challenges, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (T-ASE) publishes foundational research on Automation: Scientific methods and technologies that improve efficiency, productivity, quality, and reliability, specifically for methods, machines, and systems operating in structured environments over long periods, and the explicit structuring of environments.Its coverage goes beyond Automation's roots in mass production and includes many new application areas, such as Biotechnology, pharmaceutical systems, and health care; Home, service, and retail; Construction, transportation, and security; Manufacturing, maintenance, and supply chains; and Food handling and processing.We welcome the abstractions, algorithms, theories, methodologies, models, systems, and case studies covering topics related to robots and intelligent machines/systems, as well as topics at the Operational/Enterprise levels such as System Modeling, Analysis, Performance Evaluation; Planning, Scheduling, Coordination; Risk Management; Supply Chain Management.T-ASE integrates knowledge across disciplines and industries and, to facilitate the transfer of research into practice, requests that each article include a 100-300 word Note to Practitioners (NtP).Writing a good NtP is a challenge.Rather than simply restating the Abstract or Introduction in less technical terms, authors should step back and describe without jargon how their results could be applied or extended to practical problems, and discuss the potential and limitations of the work, as though they were addressing a colleague from industry.An example NtP can be found in the T-ASE home page http://www.ieee-ras.org/tase.This TRANSACTIONS publishes Regular as well as Communication Items.Communication Items are a class of short manuscripts that are subject to an expedited review process.Appropriate items include, but are not limited to, rebuttals or counterexamples of previously published articles, or preliminary results of significant current research of wide interest.Normally, members of the Editorial Board review these submissions internally, although they may request outside review when appropriate.Manuscripts of a tutorial or review nature are welcome, and authors of such