Chinese Control Conference, CCC

About Chinese Control Conference, CCC

Chinese Control Conference, CCC: A Complete Profile

The Chinese Control Conference — CCC — is one of the largest and longest-running annual conferences in the world on systems and control, and the title catalogued here is its proceedings: the multi-volume record of papers presented at each year's conference, published through the IEEE Conference Publications Program, archived in IEEE Xplore, and recorded as a continuing proceedings series with ISSN 2161-2927 and 1934-1768. It is not a journal. It has no editor-in-chief in the journal sense, no article processing charge, and no Journal Impact Factor. What it has is scale, longevity and a central place in the life of the Chinese control community: thousands of papers per edition in recent decades, a permanent organising committee in the Technical Committee on Control Theory of the Chinese Association of Automation, and a proceedings archive that mirrors the rise of Chinese control science from a largely domestic field to one of the largest producers of control research in the world.

That scale is the first thing a reader must grasp. When SCImago's ranking of modelling and simulation venues listed this title, it recorded over 1,600 documents in a single year and more than 22,000 references across them — figures of a different order from a typical specialist conference, comparable to a large journal's annual output. The catalogue record attached to this entry gives the proceedings an h-index of 45: papers in these volumes have, collectively, been cited on a scale that few conference series anywhere match. Yet the unit of publication remains the six-page conference paper, reviewed for a July conference in a Chinese host city, and this profile will describe CCC in those honest terms — its organisation, its unusually detailed topic structure, its publication and indexing history, its leadership conventions, what its metrics do and do not mean, and how authors and readers should work with it.

What CCC Is and Who Runs It

CCC is an annual international conference organised by the Technical Committee on Control Theory (TCCT) of the Chinese Association of Automation (CAA). The TCCT is the permanent organiser: it owns the conference from year to year, while a local host institution in each year's host city handles the on-the-ground organisation. The 25th conference in 2006, for example, was locally organised by the Center for Control Theory and Guidance Technology of Harbin Institute of Technology; the 31st in 2012 was hosted in Hefei with the University of Science and Technology of China among its organising institutions; and the 39th in 2020 was held in Shenyang. Numbering in the 2006–2024 sequence — 25th, 31st, 35th in Chengdu in 2016, 37th in Wuhan in 2018, 39th in 2020, 40th in 2021, and the 43rd edition in Kunming in 2024 — establishes the annual rhythm and a history extending back over four decades of editions.

The conference is international in sponsorship as well as attendance. Its calls for papers list co-sponsorship by the IEEE Control Systems Society, Japan's Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE), and Korea's Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems, alongside Chinese co-organisers that have included the Systems Engineering Society of China, the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science and the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the China Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. That combination — a Chinese national committee as permanent owner, learned societies from three countries as co-sponsors, and IEEE as the publication channel — explains both the conference's character and its proceedings' reach.

The format is that of a full-scale congress: plenary talks, panel discussions, invited sessions, pre-conference workshops, oral sessions and poster (interactive) sessions spread across several days, conventionally in late July. The 2012 edition ran 25–27 July in Hefei, the 2016 edition 27–29 July in Chengdu, the 2018 edition 25–27 July in Wuhan, and the 2020 edition 27–29 July in Shenyang. A researcher planning around CCC can rely on that late-July window and on the rotation among major Chinese cities with strong control groups.

Aims and Scope: A Map of Control Science

CCC exists, in its organisers' formulation, to give scientists and engineers worldwide a forum to present new theoretical results and techniques in systems and control. Its scope is operationalised as a numbered list of topic codes — S01 through S37 in the 2020 call, extending beyond S40 in later listings as new areas were added — and that list is worth reading as a map of the discipline itself, because the conference intends to cover all of it.

The theoretical core comes first: system theory and control theory; nonlinear systems and control; complexity and complex system theory; distributed parameter systems; stability and stabilisation; stochastic systems; system modelling and identification; hybrid systems and discrete event dynamic systems. The classical design disciplines follow: optimal control; optimisation and scheduling; robust control; adaptive control and learning control; variable structure control; predictive control; process control; motion control; and control design as a topic in its own right. A third band covers information and computation in control: signal processing and information fusion; big data analysis and control; fuzzy systems and fuzzy control; cloud computing and computing intelligence; neural networks and deep learning; pattern recognition; and game theory and social networks, as the extended topic list shows.

The application and systems band is where CCC's scale becomes intelligible: navigation and guidance; intelligent robots; fault diagnosis and reliable control; knowledge automation; cyber-physical systems; control of networked systems and network control systems; multi-agent systems and distributed control; sensor networks and the Internet of Things; new energy technology and control in the environment, including the smart grid; vehicle and transportation system control; data-driven modelling and control; micro-nano and quantum systems; systems biology and life systems; intelligent manufacturing and industrial intelligence; systems engineering theory and method; system simulation, integration and evaluation; information systems and network security; social-economic systems; and automation and control education. A conference that lists systems biology, quantum systems, power grids, vehicle control and control education as sibling topics is deliberately a parliament of the whole field, and its proceedings are correspondingly broad: any topic in modern control is likely to have a CCC literature, often a large one.

Two cautions follow from that breadth. First, quality and significance vary across such a volume more than in a small, selective workshop; readers should evaluate individual papers, their authors and their subsequent citation and journal afterlife rather than treating appearance in the proceedings as a uniform stamp. Second, CCC maintains a sister landscape that should not be confused with it: the Chinese Control and Decision Conference (CCDC) is a separate, also large Chinese control meeting with its own proceedings, and citing one for the other is a real and avoidable error.

Publication Details

Publisher and archive. Proceedings are produced under the copyright of the TCCT/CAA and published through IEEE: each edition carries an IEEE catalogue number and ISBNs for its formats — the 2016 edition's print-on-demand ISBN is 978-1-5090-0910-7, with a separate online ISBN — and the papers are archived in IEEE Xplore with individual DOIs, recent editions appearing under DOI stems such as 10.23919/CCC for the 2021 conference. The Journals World catalogue record names IEEE Computer Society as publisher for this title; in IEEE's conference system the practical facts for users are the Xplore archive and the DOI, which are uniform across editions.

ISSN. The series is recorded with ISSN 2161-2927 and ISSN 1934-1768, identifying the continuing proceedings across its media. Edition-level ISBNs and the paper DOI remain the precise identifiers for citation.

Frequency and size. Annual, one edition and proceedings set per year. Editions publish well over a thousand papers — the SCImago snapshot cited above counted 1,633 documents in its sample year — making each year's proceedings a multi-volume-scale collection delivered electronically through Xplore rather than as a single physical book.

Language and access. Papers are in English, the conference's working language for its international programme. The proceedings are not an open-access journal and carry no article processing charge; access is through IEEE Xplore by subscription or purchase, with authors' versions frequently available through institutional pages. Author-side costs are the conference's registration arrangements for the edition attended, as set by that year's organisers.

Editorial and Programme Leadership

A conference of this size is led by committees rather than an editor, and its governance has two layers. The permanent layer is the TCCT itself, whose membership — drawn from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Harbin Institute of Technology and the other centres of Chinese control research — provides continuity, owns the conference series, and supplies its advisory structure; the 2012 call for papers lists an advisory committee including Xiren Cao, Daizhan Cheng, Lei Guo and Yu-Chi Ho of Harvard among its members, names that indicate the seniority at which the series is overseen. The edition layer — general chair, programme and organising committees, and the local host team — changes with each host city and is named in that year's call for papers and proceedings front matter.

Peer review is exercised at that scale through the programme committee and the invited-session structure: contributed papers are reviewed for the oral and poster programme, and invited sessions, organised by specialists around defined themes, form a significant part of the scientific architecture. Because committees rotate, this profile does not present any single year's roster as a permanent editorial board; readers needing the responsible chairs for a specific volume should consult that edition's front matter.

Indexing and Abstracting

CCC's indexing history is documented in its own calls for papers. The proceedings were selected for coverage in ISI Proceedings / ISTP (the Index to Scientific and Technical Proceedings) from 2005, were included in the IEEE Conference Publications Program from 2006 with archiving in IEEE Xplore, and have been cited by EI (Engineering Index, now EI Compendex) since 2006. The 2020 call restates the position plainly: proceedings covered in IEEE Xplore and indexed by EI Compendex since 2006. The series is also tracked by SCImago as a conference and proceedings title, the source of the citation indicators discussed next. For most authors the operative facts are Xplore archiving with a DOI and EI Compendex indexing, both long-established for this series; as with any conference, confirmation for a specific future edition rests with that edition's organisers.

Metrics: What Can Honestly Be Said

There is no Journal Impact Factor for CCC, and quoting one would be an error. The honest indicators are the conference-level ones: this catalogue records an h-index of 45 for the proceedings, and SCImago's data show the volume behind it — over sixteen hundred documents in a sample year, with an SJR of 0.126 recorded in its 2013 modelling and simulation ranking. That pairing — a high cumulative h-index with a low average citation rate per document — is exactly what a very large, inclusive national-flagship conference produces: a long tail of locally read papers, and a substantial head of well-cited work by the field's leading groups, for whom CCC is a regular venue. Neither figure grades an individual paper. A CCC paper by a major group, later extended into a journal article, may be heavily cited; a routine contributed paper may be cited rarely. Both are normal, and evaluators familiar with Chinese control research read CCC records accordingly — as evidence of peer-reviewed presentation in the field's principal Chinese forum, with the paper's own record carrying the real weight.

Submission Guidance

Authors submit through the current edition's system, under the topic codes of that year's call for papers, and should select the code that matches their paper's primary contribution, since the code determines the reviewing pool and session. The call for each edition — published by the host institution, as the 2020 call hosted at Northeastern University illustrates — states the paper format and length (IEEE conference format; papers in the proceedings run to a standard six-page pattern), the deadlines, which fall months ahead of the late-July conference, and the registration conditions. Contributed papers, invited-session proposals, and workshop proposals follow separate tracks within the same call, and prospective invited-session organisers should engage the programme committee early, since those sessions are a structural feature of the conference rather than an afterthought.

International authors are explicitly welcomed — the conference frames itself as a forum for scientists and engineers “over the world”, its plenary and advisory rosters are international, and its co-sponsors include Japanese and Korean societies and the IEEE Control Systems Society — but should plan for the practicalities of a large Chinese host-city conference: visa timing, the conference's own registration channel, and presentation in English. As with all IEEE conferences, Xplore publication presumes presentation under the conference's rules, and no-show handling follows the edition's stated policy.

How to Cite and Use These Proceedings

Cite the paper: authors, title, the numbered edition of the Chinese Control Conference with year and host city, page range, and DOI — the Crossref record for a 2021 paper shows the pattern, DOI 10.23919/CCC52363.2021.9550146 within the 40th conference's proceedings. For literature work, CCC's proceedings are best used in three ways: as a discovery layer for Chinese control research, much of which appears here before or alongside journal publication; as a survey instrument, since the topic-code structure lets a reader enumerate a whole subfield's recent output within one or two editions; and as a bibliometric source on the field's development, where the growth of topics such as data-driven control, multi-agent systems and intelligent manufacturing across successive editions documents the discipline's own movement. In all three uses, follow citations forward to the extended journal versions that strong CCC papers commonly produce.

CCC in the Life of Its Research Community

To understand why these proceedings matter beyond their citation counts, it helps to see the role the conference plays for the community that produces them. For Chinese control researchers — including the large cohort of doctoral students for whom a CCC paper, with its invited sessions, workshops and direct contact with the TCCT's senior figures, is often a first peer-reviewed international publication — the conference is the field's annual gathering point, the place where groups from Harbin to Guangzhou compare results, organise collaborations and recruit. The TCCT's own meetings are held alongside it, as the photographic record of the 2006 conference illustrates, so governance, community and science advance in the same week. Foreign participants, in turn, consistently describe the conference in its own organisers' terms: as a convenient way for researchers from abroad, and for younger Chinese researchers in particular, to learn new trends from leading international scholars, in a programme whose plenary speakers are drawn from the world field.

That community function also explains the proceedings' archival value for outsiders. Because CCC is where the Chinese control community reports to itself, its volumes register shifts in national research priorities — the growth of intelligent manufacturing, new energy systems, unmanned systems and data-driven methods — earlier and more completely than the subset of Chinese work that reaches Western journals. A reader who treats these proceedings only as a citation source misses half their content: they are also a year-by-year documentary record of one of the world's largest engineering research communities at work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is CCC a journal? No. It is an annual international conference; this title is its proceedings series, published through IEEE with ISSN 2161-2927 and 1934-1768.

Who organises it? The Technical Committee on Control Theory (TCCT) of the Chinese Association of Automation (CAA) is the permanent organiser, with a local host institution in each year's city and co-sponsorship including the IEEE Control Systems Society, SICE (Japan) and the Korean institute for control, robotics and systems.

When and where is it held? Annually in late July, rotating among Chinese cities — Hefei in 2012, Chengdu in 2016, Wuhan in 2018, Shenyang in 2020, Kunming in 2024, among many others.

How large is it? Very large for a control conference: recent editions publish well over a thousand papers, and the proceedings' recorded h-index is 45.

Where are the papers published and indexed? In IEEE Xplore with individual DOIs, through the IEEE Conference Publications Program (from 2006); indexed by EI Compendex since 2006, and covered by ISI Proceedings/ISTP from 2005.

Is CCC the same as CCDC? No. The Chinese Control and Decision Conference is a separate conference with its own proceedings; do not cite one for the other.

Does CCC have an impact factor or an article processing charge? Neither — those are journal concepts. Author costs are the edition's conference registration arrangements.

In what language are the proceedings? English, although the host community is Chinese; the conference is an international meeting with overseas co-sponsors and participants.

Profile note (DEPTH-BATCH227): this entry describes a conference proceedings series honestly as such; journal-style fields in the catalogue record should be read subject to the explanation above.