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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 (MPC).


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 MPC 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.


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Short CV
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Jaques Richalet was born in Versailles, France, in 1936. 

He studied aeronautical engineering at ENSAE in Paris and graduated in 1960. 

He then went to Berkeley, USA, where he obtained his MSc degree under the 
guidance of Prof. Zadeh. Back in Paris he worked in the field of applied 
mathematics and received his PhD in 1965. 

His interest in model based predictive control started as early as 1968. 
In the same year he founded the process engineering consulting company 
ADERSA with a major breakthrough being the first commissioned application 
of model based predictive control to a binary distillation column in 1973. 

Since then he has been active in the areas of process identification, 
modelling and diagnosis methods such as predictive maintenance. 
Applications range from petrochemical and food industry to faster systems 
as encountered in the automotive and defense sector. 

He was a manager of ADERSA till 2001 
and is still working as a consultant for modelling and predictive 
control.  He now lives in Versailles in France.

In his academic career he published more than fifty articles as 
well as three books on identification and predictive control. He has 
been president of the National Committee of Automatic Control and 
chairman of EEC Interest Group "CIDIC". For his achievements he was 
awarded the status as Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Merite and many 
researchers would probably agree to call him the "grandfather of 
predicteive control".

email: jacques.richalet@wanadoo.fr