Conference on Control and Fault-Tolerant Systems, SysTol

About Conference on Control and Fault-Tolerant Systems, SysTol

About the Conference on Control and Fault-Tolerant Systems (SysTol)

The Conference on Control and Fault-Tolerant Systems, widely known by its acronym SysTol, is an international scientific conference devoted to the theory and practice of fault detection, fault diagnosis, and fault-tolerant control. Unlike a scholarly journal, SysTol is a recurring academic meeting: every few years it gathers researchers and engineers who work on keeping complex automatic control systems safe, reliable, and dependable even when components fail. Its proceedings are published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and distributed on IEEE Xplore, which is why the conference also appears in bibliographic databases with conference-proceedings identifiers, including ISSN 2162-1195 and ISSN 2162-1209 for the proceedings series.

The conference was created to give the fault-tolerant control community a regular forum of its own. Modern automatic control systems integrate sensors, actuators, controllers, microprocessors, power electronics, communication networks, and software into tightly coupled, heterogeneous ensembles. Their complexity keeps growing as industries demand higher performance, deeper automation, and wider operating ranges. Against this background, the ability to detect a fault early, isolate its cause, and reconfigure the control law so that the system keeps performing acceptably — the essence of fault-tolerant control — is a central engineering concern. SysTol exists to advance exactly this body of knowledge, from mathematical theory to field applications.

SysTol is held every three years, deliberately interleaved with the IFAC Symposium on Fault Detection, Supervision and Safety of Technical Processes (SAFEPROCESS), so that the two meetings alternate and the community has a major event to attend roughly every eighteen months. Because it is a conference rather than a periodical, it has no volume-and-issue structure, no editorial board in the journal sense, and no article processing charge: authors submit papers to each edition, the International Program Committee peer-reviews them, and accepted papers are presented at the meeting and published in the proceedings.

Aims and Scope

The core thematic territory of SysTol is fault detection and isolation (FDI), fault diagnosis, and fault-tolerant control (FTC) for dynamic systems. Papers typically address one or more of the following: model-based and data-driven fault detection methods; residual generation and evaluation; fault isolation and identification; active and passive fault-tolerant control architectures; reconfigurable and adaptive control under faults; fault prognosis and remaining-useful-life estimation; system monitoring, supervision, and maintenance decision-making; and the safety, reliability, availability, and dependability analysis of controlled systems.

The methods discussed at SysTol span the full methodological spectrum of control engineering: observer-based and parity-space approaches, parameter estimation, statistical decision theory, signal-processing and time-frequency analysis, machine-learning and neural-network techniques for diagnosis, hybrid and switched-system methods, robust and adaptive control, model predictive control under faults, and more recently, approaches that combine control theory with cybersecurity. Applications cut across the major industrial sectors — aerospace, automotive, energy and power systems, process industries, manufacturing automation, robotics, marine and autonomous vehicles — wherever a fault in a feedback loop can endanger people, the environment, or expensive equipment.

Each edition also sets special emphases that reflect the evolving research frontier. The inaugural edition concentrated on the fundamentals of FDI and FTC for highly integrated, networked automatic systems. Later editions broadened toward prognosis, health management, and reliability engineering. The most recent edition, SysTol 2025, devoted special attention to cybersecurity, safety, and health-aware control — acknowledging that modern control systems are cyber-physical systems exposed to malicious attacks as well as physical faults, and that a credible fault-tolerant strategy must cover both. This trajectory shows how the conference has stayed aligned with the industrial and scientific concerns of each period while keeping its identity firmly rooted in diagnosis and fault tolerance.

Publication Details

• Event type: International peer-reviewed scientific conference (not a journal)
• Acronym: SysTol
• Proceedings identifiers: ISSN 2162-1195; ISSN 2162-1209 (proceedings series)
• Proceedings publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Piscataway, New Jersey, USA
• Distribution: IEEE Xplore Digital Library
• Frequency: Every three years, alternating with the IFAC SAFEPROCESS symposium
• Language: English
• Official web presence: systol.org (editions maintain their own sites, e.g. the 2025 edition at the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence, University of Cyprus)
• Open access: Proceedings are published under the standard IEEE copyright model; individual papers may be made openly accessible by their authors through institutional repositories where permitted

Readers should note that because SysTol is a conference, it does not carry a journal-style impact factor, quartile ranking, or article processing charge. Conference papers are cited through their proceedings entry and digital object identifier (DOI), for example in the form 10.1109/SysTol.... issued by IEEE.

History and Editions

The idea for SysTol grew out of the dependability, diagnosis, and fault-tolerant control research group at the Research Centre for Automatic Control of Nancy (CRAN) in France. The group saw a demand for a dedicated, recurring scientific forum in system monitoring, fault detection and diagnosis, and fault-tolerant control — a forum the community had previously found only inside broader control conferences or the triennial IFAC SAFEPROCESS symposium.

SysTol 2010, the first edition, was held from October 6 to 8, 2010, at the Nice Acropolis Exhibition and Convention Centre in Nice, France. It was sponsored by CRAN, with the IEEE Control Systems Society as technical co-sponsor alongside the French GIS 3SGS and the French GDR MACS research networks. The meeting established the conference's template: peer-reviewed papers, plenary talks, and sessions spanning theory and application, with the proceedings published on IEEE Xplore.

SysTol 2013, the second edition, returned to Nice from October 9 to 11, 2013, consolidating the event's position in the control community's calendar. SysTol 2016, the third edition, moved to Barcelona, Spain, from September 7 to 9, 2016. It was sponsored by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and its Research Center for Supervision, Safety and Automatic Control (CS2AC), technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Control Systems Society and the IEEE Reliability Society, and supported by the Spanish Committee of Automatic Control (CEA-IFAC).

SysTol 2019, the fourth edition, took place in Casablanca, Morocco, from September 18 to 20, 2019 — the conference's first edition on the African continent. SysTol 2021, the fifth edition, was held in Saint-Raphaël, France, from September 29 to October 1, 2021; its proceedings carry IEEE identifiers such as 978-1-6654-3159-0 and DOI prefix 10.1109/SysTol52990.2021.

SysTol 2025, the sixth edition, was held in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, from October 6 to 8, 2025, organized through the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence at the University of Cyprus, with IEEE co-sponsorship and Didier Theilliol serving as publicity chair. The 2025 edition's call for papers set the draft-paper submission deadline at April 11, 2025, acceptance notifications at June 13, 2025, and final manuscripts at July 7, 2025 — a timeline typical of the conference's peer-review cycle.

Organization and Peer Review

Each SysTol edition is run by an Organizing Committee drawn from the host institutions and an International Program Committee (IPC) of specialists in fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control. Authors submit draft papers — usually four to six pages in the IEEE two-column format — through the conference's submission system. Each paper is evaluated by multiple reviewers from the IPC; the criteria are the standard ones for control-engineering conferences: originality, technical correctness, clarity of presentation, and relevance to the conference scope. Accepted papers must be presented at the meeting (in person or, in exceptional editions, virtually) to appear in the proceedings.

There is no standing editor-in-chief, because the "editorial" responsibility rotates with the host: the general chairs, program chairs, and IPC members of each edition shape its technical program. The scientific quality of the proceedings is safeguarded by IEEE's publication standards and by the continuity of the IPC membership, which carries the community's standards from one edition to the next.

Indexing and Abstracting

SysTol proceedings are indexed through the standard channels that cover IEEE conference publications. The principal access point is IEEE Xplore, where each paper receives a DOI and full bibliographic metadata. IEEE conference proceedings are routinely picked up by Scopus and the Web of Science Conference Proceedings Citation Index, which is how the proceedings accumulate citation records; the H-index figures sometimes quoted for the proceedings series (around 19) derive from such citation databases. Authors and librarians can also find individual editions through university library catalogs — for instance, the 2013 proceedings are catalogued with ISBNs 1-4799-2855-0 and 1-4799-2856-9 — and through open repositories where authors have deposited their manuscripts.

Because SysTol is a conference series, it is not listed in the Journal Citation Reports and does not receive a Journal Impact Factor or a Scopus journal quartile. Readers evaluating the conference's standing should look instead at its citation record in Scopus and Google Scholar, the reputation of its IPC, and the fact of IEEE publication with technical co-sponsorship from the IEEE Control Systems Society and the IEEE Reliability Society.

Metrics and Research Impact

Conventional journal metrics do not apply to conferences, so the honest way to gauge SysTol's impact is through its community and its citation footprint. The conference has run for six editions across fifteen years and three continents, with proceedings that are consistently cited in the fault-diagnosis and fault-tolerant control literature — the bibliographic databases that track the proceedings series report an H-index in the high teens, which is a respectable figure for a triennial specialist conference.

The intellectual impact is visible in the research themes the conference has carried into the mainstream: model-based and data-driven FDI, active fault-tolerant control, prognosis and health management, and the recent convergence of fault tolerance with cybersecurity. Papers first presented at SysTol have gone on to anchor journal publications and industrial practice in aerospace, automotive, and energy systems. The alternating rhythm with IFAC SAFEPROCESS has made the pair the backbone of the international calendar for this subfield.

Prospective authors sometimes ask about acceptance rates. Like most IEEE technical conferences, SysTol does not publish an official acceptance rate; the review process is competitive and selective, with the IPC maintaining the quality bar set by the earlier editions. Registration fees — not article processing charges — apply to attending authors, as is standard for conferences.

How to Participate and Submit

Participation in SysTol follows the standard IEEE conference cycle. Roughly a year before each edition, the organizers publish a call for papers on the conference website and through the IEEE Control Systems Society and GDR MACS channels. Authors prepare a draft paper in the IEEE conference format and submit it by the announced deadline; the IPC reviews the submissions, and authors of accepted papers submit a camera-ready final version and register for the conference.

Practical advice for prospective authors: frame the contribution around the conference's core vocabulary — detection, isolation, diagnosis, tolerance, reconfiguration, prognosis, safety, dependability — and demonstrate the method on a convincing example, whether a benchmark, a simulation study, or an experimental or industrial case. Purely theoretical papers are welcome, but the community values papers that show how a method behaves when faults actually occur. Special sessions and invited sessions are a traditional feature of SysTol; researchers with a coherent set of contributions on a focused topic can propose a special session to the program chairs of the upcoming edition.

For the most current information — dates, venue, submission deadlines, registration fees, and the call for papers — consult the official conference website (systol.org) and the edition-specific site announced there, since all details rotate with the host.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is SysTol a journal?

No. SysTol — the Conference on Control and Fault-Tolerant Systems — is a triennial international scientific conference. Its outputs are peer-reviewed conference papers published in IEEE proceedings, not journal articles. It therefore has no volume-and-issue structure, no editor-in-chief, and no Journal Impact Factor.

How often is SysTol held, and where was the latest edition?

SysTol is held every three years, alternating with the IFAC SAFEPROCESS symposium. Six editions have taken place: Nice 2010, Nice 2013, Barcelona 2016, Casablanca 2019, Saint-Raphaël 2021, and Ayia Napa (Cyprus) 2025.

Where are SysTol papers published?

In the conference proceedings published by IEEE and distributed on IEEE Xplore. Each paper receives a DOI in the 10.1109/SysTol... series, and the proceedings are indexed by the major citation databases that cover IEEE conferences.

Does SysTol charge an article processing fee?

No. As a conference, SysTol does not levy article processing charges. Presenting authors pay the standard conference registration fee set by the organizers of each edition.

Who organizes SysTol?

Each edition is organized by its host institutions — for example CRAN for the first editions, UPC/CS2AC for 2016, and the KIOS Center at the University of Cyprus for 2025 — with technical co-sponsorship from IEEE societies (the IEEE Control Systems Society and, in some editions, the IEEE Reliability Society) and support from research networks such as the French GDR MACS and GIS 3SGS.

What topics fit a SysTol submission?

Fault detection and isolation, fault diagnosis, fault-tolerant and reconfigurable control, fault prognosis and health management, system monitoring and supervision, and the safety, reliability, and dependability of controlled systems — across theory, algorithms, and applications in any industrial sector. Recent editions have added cybersecurity and health-aware control to the scope.

How should I cite a SysTol paper?

Cite it as a conference paper: authors, title, "Proceedings of the [Nth] Conference on Control and Fault-Tolerant Systems (SysTol), [city], [year]", IEEE, page numbers, and the DOI. The proceedings ISBNs and ISSNs (2162-1195 / 2162-1209) identify the series in library catalogs.

Key Research Themes Across Editions

Reading across the six SysTol editions reveals how the field of fault-tolerant control has matured. The earliest editions were dominated by model-based fault detection: observers, parity equations, and parameter-estimation schemes that generate residuals — signals that stay near zero in healthy operation and deviate when a fault appears. A second persistent thread is active fault-tolerant control, where a fault detection and diagnosis module feeds a reconfiguration mechanism that switches or adapts the controller in real time; papers in this stream often demonstrate their schemes on aerospace benchmarks such as aircraft actuators or on automotive subsystems like steer-by-wire.

A third thread, increasingly prominent from 2016 onward, is fault prognosis and health management: estimating not just that a fault has occurred but how it will evolve and how much useful life remains. This connects SysTol to the predictive-maintenance revolution in manufacturing and energy, where operators of wind turbines, power converters, and production lines need advance warning rather than post-mortem diagnosis. A fourth thread is data-driven and learning-based diagnosis, which has grown with the availability of industrial sensor data and now sits alongside the classical model-based literature rather than replacing it.

The 2025 edition's emphasis on cybersecurity reflects the field's newest frontier: attackers who inject false data into sensors or compromise actuators create effects that are mathematically similar to faults but adversarial in nature. Distinguishing cyber-attacks from physical faults, and designing controllers that remain safe under both, is now one of the most active research directions in the community — and SysTol has positioned itself as one of the venues where that convergence is worked out.

Accessing the Proceedings

The authoritative source for SysTol papers is IEEE Xplore, where the proceedings of each edition are published under IEEE copyright. University libraries with IEEE subscriptions provide full-text access; individual papers can also be purchased from IEEE. Many authors deposit pre-prints or accepted manuscripts in institutional repositories — the Technical University of Denmark's repository, the UPC's UPCommons, and the Budapest University of Technology's eprints archive all host SysTol papers, for example — so a web search for a paper title often finds an openly accessible version.

Librarians cataloguing the series should use the proceedings ISSNs 2162-1195 and 2162-1209 and the edition ISBNs printed in each proceedings volume (for instance, 978-1-4799-2854-5 for the 2013 edition and 978-1-7281-0379-2 for 2019). Because the series title is shared across editions, edition year and venue are the essential disambiguators in citations and catalog records.

More Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between SysTol and IFAC SAFEPROCESS?

Both serve the fault-diagnosis and fault-tolerant control community, and they are deliberately scheduled to alternate every three years. SAFEPROCESS is the IFAC symposium with the longer history; SysTol was founded to provide a complementary, IEEE-published forum in the years between SAFEPROCESS editions. Many researchers attend both.

Can students attend SysTol?

Yes. Like most IEEE conferences, SysTol welcomes doctoral students and early-career researchers, and student registration rates are typically offered. Presenting a paper at SysTol is a well-established way for a PhD student in control engineering to enter the fault-diagnosis research community.

Are SysTol papers peer-reviewed?

Yes. Every submitted paper is reviewed by members of the International Program Committee before acceptance, and the proceedings are published under IEEE's publication standards.