IECON Proceedings (Industrial Electronics Conference)

About IECON Proceedings (Industrial Electronics Conference)

IECON Proceedings (Industrial Electronics Conference) — A Full Profile of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society's Flagship Conference Series

IECON Proceedings (Industrial Electronics Conference) is not a journal. It is the published proceedings series of IECON, the Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES) — the society's flagship yearly conference, held in a different city each year, whose peer-reviewed papers are published as a proceedings volume and submitted for inclusion in the IEEE Xplore digital library. Anyone choosing where to publish, or trying to understand a citation to “IECON Proceedings,” needs that distinction first, because almost everything else follows from it: there is no journal editor-in-chief receiving manuscripts year-round, no article processing charge of the journal kind, no Journal Impact Factor, and no monthly or quarterly issue. There is instead a conference — with a call for papers, tracks, special sessions, tutorials, workshops, keynotes and deadlines — and, after the conference, a proceedings record that libraries, indexes and engineers cite for decades.

The conference is the annual gathering of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, the IEEE society concerned with electronics in industry: power electronics and energy conversion, electrical machines and drives, renewable energy and smart grids, control systems, robotics and mechatronics, industrial informatics, cyber-physical systems, sensors, embedded systems and the information technologies that bind modern factories, buildings, transport and energy systems together. IECON is where that community presents new work. The IEEE Industrial Electronics Society's own conference pages describe IECON 2026 as the 52nd Annual Conference of the society, to be held 18–21 October 2026 in Doha, Qatar, and that numbering tells the history at a glance: a conference that reached its fiftieth edition in Chicago in November 2024 and its fifty-first in Madrid in October 2025 has been running, under the IECON name and its immediate predecessors, since the mid-1970s. The proceedings series profiled here is the cumulative published record of that run.

The bibliographic identity of the series needs care, because proceedings titles are catalogued in more than one form. The proceedings carry the ISSNs 2577-1647 and 2162-4704 recorded for this title — numbers associated with the conference's continuing proceedings publication in its different formats and periods — and each individual year's proceedings also carries its own ISBN as an IEEE conference publication. Search an index for a single IECON paper and you will usually be given the conference name, the year, the city, the paper's page range or article number and a DOI registered through IEEE; search for the series as a whole and you will find it treated as a conference-and-proceedings title in Scopus-based listings. Both views are correct; they are views of the same object at different levels. This profile describes the series as a whole, and explains how to read and cite the individual years within it.

A second correction belongs at the front of the profile. Some secondary listings, including earlier directory information for this title, associate the proceedings with the IEEE Computer Society. The conference's sponsor of record, in the society's own materials, is the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society: it is the Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, organised through the society's conference structure, with the technical programme reflecting the society's fields of interest. IEEE conferences involve several IEEE organisational units in publication and distribution through IEEE Xplore, which is how other society names can enter a catalogue record, but authors deciding where their work belongs should understand IECON as the Industrial Electronics Society's flagship — its topics, its reviewers and its community are those of industrial electronics, not of general computer science.

Overview: What IECON Is and Who Stands Behind It

IEEE — the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers — is the world's largest technical professional organisation of its kind, and its societies are the disciplinary homes within it. The Industrial Electronics Society is one of those societies, and IECON is its flagship annual conference. The society itself describes the conference, in its Industrial Electronics Technology News and conference pages, as devoted to the dissemination of new ideas, research and work in progress across fields that include robotics and mechatronics, power electronics, cybersecurity, renewable energy, smart grids, digital twins, artificial intelligence for industrial processes and Industry 5.0. The 2025 edition's own materials broaden the same list in the society's current language: contemporary industry topics ranging from renewable energy, smart grid resiliency, power electronics, controls, robotics and manufacturing to communications and artificial intelligence.

Each edition is hosted by a local organising team in the host city, under the society's oversight, with a general chair or co-chairs, a technical programme committee drawn from the society's technical committees, track chairs for the subject areas, and organisers for the special sessions, tutorials and workshops that sit alongside the regular programme. The 51st edition, IECON 2025, was held 14–17 October 2025 in Madrid, Spain; the 50th, IECON 2024, was held 3–6 November 2024 in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States; the 49th, IECON 2023, was held in Singapore in October 2023; and the 52nd is announced for Doha, Qatar, 18–21 October 2026. The rotation among continents is deliberate and typical of IEEE flagship conferences: the community is global, and the conference moves to it.

The proceedings are the conference's permanent record. Papers accepted through peer review and presented at the conference are published in the IECON proceedings and submitted for inclusion in IEEE Xplore, the digital library through which IEEE conference and journal literature is distributed to subscribing institutions worldwide. That Xplore presence is the practical reason IECON papers are so widely read and cited in electrical and electronic engineering: a paper that might otherwise live only in a printed volume on a shelf is instead full-text searchable by every engineer whose institution subscribes, and its bibliographic record propagates into Scopus, Google Scholar and the other indexes that engineers actually use.

Aims and Scope

The aim of IECON, stated across the society's conference materials, is to create an international forum for experts, scientists and practising engineers to present the latest research findings and ideas on contemporary industry topics — and to do so across the whole breadth of industrial electronics rather than in a single narrow specialism. The scope is therefore deliberately wide, and is organised in each edition into technical tracks. The 2025 call, published through the society's channels, grouped its topics under three broad headings that map the field well.

Under Energy fall power systems and the smart grid; renewable energy systems; power electronics and energy conversion; electrical machines and drives; electrical energy storage systems; and electric transportation. This is the track family in which papers on converters and inverters, motor drives, grid integration of wind and solar generation, microgrids, battery systems, electric-vehicle charging and energy management belong — historically the largest part of the IECON programme and the core of the society's identity since the field's power-electronics expansion.

Under Control and Robotics fall control systems and intelligent and data-driven control; motion control; robotics and mechatronics; instrumentation, sensors and actuators; systems integration and nanotechnologies; and signal and image processing and computational intelligence. Papers here range from classical and modern control theory applied to industrial plants, through servo and motion systems for manufacturing, to robot perception, human–machine interaction, assistive robotics and medical applications of control — the society's own topic language explicitly includes human-centric medicine and assistive robotics within this broad area.

Under Information and Communication Technologies and interdisciplinary areas fall electronic systems on chip and embedded systems; intelligent factory automation; ICT and artificial intelligence enabling smart cities and buildings; energy efficiency and sustainability applications; ICT enablers of autonomy and smart transport, including transport electrification, smart grids and renewable integration; and human-centric ICT, including industrial cyber-physical systems and machine-learning applications in industry. This third family is where Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 work concentrates: industrial Internet of Things, edge and cloud systems for factories, digital twins, industrial communications and cybersecurity, predictive maintenance, and AI methods validated on real industrial problems rather than benchmark datasets alone.

Alongside the tracks sit the elements that make a flagship conference more than a paper-delivery mechanism: keynote and plenary talks by leading figures from academia and industry; tutorials and workshops, including the co-located International Conference on E-Learning in Industrial Electronics (ICELIE), which has been held together with IECON so participants can attend both; panels and industry forums; student and young-professional activities, including, in the 2025 edition, industry-defined student challenges run over the months before the conference with their finals at IECON itself; and an exhibition and sponsorship programme connecting the research community to the companies that build industrial electronics. Special sessions — proposed by organisers around a focused theme and reviewed within the conference structure — are a characteristic IECON route into the programme for emerging topics that do not yet map neatly onto the standing tracks.

The scope boundary is equally clear. IECON is a conference of industrial electronics and its applications: work must connect to the society's fields — the conversion, control, sensing, communication and computation of industrial and energy systems — and must be presented as original research or documented industrial application suitable for a six-page conference paper (the standard regular-paper format in the conference's author instructions). Purely theoretical work with no route to an industrial system, and general computer-science or general electrical-engineering work with no industrial-electronics bearing, belongs at a sister IEEE conference rather than here; IEEE's conference ecosystem is large, and part of an author's craft is choosing the society whose reviewers will understand the contribution.

Publication Details

• Title: IECON Proceedings (Industrial Electronics Conference) — proceedings of the Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IECON)
• Type: Conference proceedings series — not a journal
• Sponsor / publisher of record: IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IEEE); proceedings published as IEEE conference publications and distributed through IEEE Xplore. Note: some secondary listings name the IEEE Computer Society — see the correction in the overview above; the conference's sponsor of record is the Industrial Electronics Society.
• ISSN: 2577-1647 and 2162-4704 (as recorded for the continuing proceedings title; individual years also carry their own ISBNs)
• Frequency: Annual — one proceedings volume per conference edition
• Recent editions: 49th, Singapore, 2023; 50th, Chicago, 3–6 November 2024; 51st, Madrid, 14–17 October 2025; 52nd, Doha, Qatar, 18–21 October 2026 (announced)
• Country / base: United States (IEEE), with the conference rotating among host cities worldwide
• Language: English
• Open access: Proceedings are distributed principally through IEEE Xplore under institutional subscription and individual purchase; individual papers may be openly available where authors' own arrangements or funder open-access routes apply. The proceedings as a whole are not a gold open-access publication.
• Article processing charge (APC): No journal-style APC applies. Authors of accepted papers normally pay conference registration — publication and presentation are tied to attendance and registration under the conference's rules for the relevant year — which is a different mechanism from a journal APC and should not be recorded as one. Exact fees are set per edition on the conference website and are not stated here because they change annually.
• Journal Impact Factor: Not applicable — conference proceedings do not receive a Clarivate Journal Impact Factor. Citation indicators for the proceedings title exist in Scopus-based listings and should be consulted there, cited with source and year.

The single most useful habit for anyone using this series bibliographically is to cite the year, not just the series. “IECON” without a year is a community; “IECON 2024, Chicago” is a publication. Each year's proceedings is a distinct volume with its own editorial team, its own ISBN and its own place in Xplore, and citation styles for IEEE conference papers include the conference name and year, the paper title, the authors, and the page or article numbers within that year's volume, with the DOI where assigned.

Editorial and Programme Information

A conference has no standing editor-in-chief; it has, for each edition, an organising committee and a technical programme committee appointed within the sponsoring society. The general chair or co-chairs of the year's edition carry the responsibility an editor-in-chief carries for a journal — final authority over the programme — supported by technical programme chairs, track chairs who manage review within their subject areas, special-session chairs, tutorial and workshop chairs, and publication chairs responsible for the proceedings volume and its delivery to IEEE Xplore. Committee membership is published on each edition's own conference website (the 2025 edition's site, for example, was iecon2025.org) and in the front matter of that year's proceedings; because it changes annually, this profile deliberately does not list individual names that would be out of date within a year, and directs readers to the current edition's site for the current names.

Underneath the yearly committees sits the permanent structure of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society: its technical committees, organised by subject area, supply much of the reviewer pool and many of the track and special-session organisers, and the society's conferences administration maintains continuity of practice — review standards, IEEE publication policies, plagiarism screening and the requirement that accepted papers be presented to be published in Xplore — from edition to edition and city to city. When authors speak informally of “the IECON editors,” this combined structure is what they mean: a yearly committee operating a permanent society system.

Peer review at IECON is conference peer review: submitted full papers are reviewed by members of the programme committee and invited experts in the track, judged on originality, technical soundness, significance to the industrial-electronics community and clarity, within the page limit the call specifies. It is a selective but fast system compared with journal review, built to a fixed conference date, and its decisions are accept or reject for that edition rather than the revise-and-resubmit cycles of a journal — one more reason the journal/proceedings distinction matters to authors planning their year.

Indexing and Abstracting

IECON proceedings are distributed through IEEE Xplore, and papers published there are covered by the major engineering discovery systems that license or index IEEE content, including Scopus — where the proceedings title is carried as a conference-and-proceedings source with its own citation record — and Google Scholar, with bibliographic records also flowing to the usual engineering abstracting services and library discovery layers. The practical consequence is that an IECON paper is findable and citable through the same channels as an IEEE journal article, and in electrical engineering hiring, promotion and literature-search practice IECON papers are routinely counted among a researcher's peer-reviewed publications.

Two cautions follow. First, indexing is per paper and per year: a paper is in Xplore because it was accepted, presented and included in that year's proceedings, and a citation should be verified against the Xplore record of that year, not assumed from the conference's general reputation. Second, because the series has run for five decades under evolving titles and formats, older papers may be recorded with the conference name forms of their period; a thorough literature search should search by topic and author within Xplore and Scopus rather than by a single series-title string.

Metrics and Standing — Read with Care

IECON's standing in its field is best described in the terms its own community uses: it is the flagship annual conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, one of the major recurring international conferences in power electronics, drives, industrial control and industrial informatics, drawing authors, reviewers and industry participants from across the society's global membership. In Scopus-based listings such as SCImago's, the proceedings title carries a substantial cumulative h-index for a conference series — the figure recorded in such listings reflects decades of heavily cited power-electronics and control papers — and a modest SJR value of the kind typical for proceedings titles, whose citation patterns differ from journals. Neither figure should be converted into a “journal impact factor,” and this profile does not do so: the Journal Impact Factor is a journal metric, this is not a journal, and any website that offers an “IECON impact factor” is selling a category error.

For an author weighing IECON against other venues, the meaningful comparisons are within the conference world: the selectivity and reputation of the conference in the specific track, the fit of the reviewers, the presence of the industrial audience the work is aimed at, the speed from submission to a citable Xplore record, and the value of presenting in person to the society's community. On those terms IECON has been a first-rank choice in industrial electronics for two generations of engineers, which is why its proceedings run from the 1970s to a 52nd edition in 2026 without a break in the sequence.

Submission and Author Guidance

Authors submit to an edition, not to the series. The annual cycle begins with the call for papers on the edition's website and through the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society's channels — for the current cycle, through the society's conference pages and the IECON 2026 materials — listing tracks, special sessions, deadlines and the submission system for that year. The society's recent calls invite regular papers reporting original work in English, prepared in the IEEE two-column conference format using IEEE's official templates, within the page limit stated in the call (six full pages including title, authors, figures and references in the recent calls, with a maximum file size also specified), and submitted electronically as PDF through the conference system by the stated deadline. Deadlines in this system are real: a flagship conference prints its programme, and late papers are not held over to a later issue, because there is no later issue — there is a next year, in another city, with another committee.

Special sessions follow the conference's own proposal route: organisers propose a focused session through the edition's special-session process, and papers for approved sessions are submitted and reviewed within the conference system, marked for that session. Tutorials and workshops have their own proposal calls. Industrial contributions are welcomed in the forms the year's call provides — the programme includes the presentation of original research and industrial applications — and the 2025 edition additionally ran industry-defined student challenges, a reminder that the route into IECON for students may include the conference's competitions and student activities as well as a regular paper.

Acceptance carries conference obligations that journal authors sometimes miss. Under IEEE conference practice as applied at IECON, an accepted paper must be presented at the conference by an author, and registration requirements stated in the year's author instructions must be met, for the paper to be published in the proceedings and submitted to IEEE Xplore; a paper whose authors do not present it risks exclusion from the published record. Copyright is transferred or licensed to IEEE under IEEE's conference publication policies, using the electronic copyright process for the edition. Authors with funder open-access obligations should arrange them through IEEE's stated options rather than assuming the proceedings are openly licensed. And because fees, page charges for over-length papers where offered, and deadlines are set per edition, every figure an author needs should be taken from the current edition's website at the time of submission — not from this profile, and not from a previous year's call.

History

IECON's numbering carries its history: a conference holding its 50th annual edition in 2024 and its 52nd in 2026 began, on the society's own count, in the mid-1970s, in the first decade of the modern power-electronics era — when the transistor and then the thyristor and the microprocessor were transforming industrial drives, power conversion and factory control from analogue arts into the digital discipline the Industrial Electronics Society was formed to serve. Through the late twentieth century the conference grew with its field: the expansion of variable-speed drives, the arrival of DSP-based control, the rise of factory automation and robotics, and the internationalisation of the society all show in the proceedings, whose host cities rotate among North America, Europe and Asia across the decades.

The twenty-first century editions track the field's current transformation. Energy — renewable generation, smart grids, storage, electric transport — grew from a track into half the programme; industrial informatics, cyber-physical systems and the industrial Internet of Things created the conference's third great theme; and the society's current topic language of Industry 5.0, digital twins and AI for industrial processes, used in the materials for the Madrid 2025 edition, shows a conference explicitly re-framing itself around human-centric, sustainable, AI-assisted industry. The co-location with ICELIE, the society's e-learning conference, and the addition of industry challenges for students mark the same period's attention to education and to the industry's next generation.

The editions of the 2020s also show the conference's resilience and reach: Singapore in 2023, the fiftieth anniversary edition in Chicago in 2024, Madrid in 2025, and Doha in 2026 — a Middle East edition reflecting the Gulf's investment in energy and industrial technology. Throughout, the proceedings have been published every year as the record of the edition, migrating over the decades from print volumes through CD-ROM to the IEEE Xplore digital library, where the backfile makes the whole arc of industrial electronics — from early drive-control papers to current work on grid-forming converters and industrial AI — searchable in one place. That searchable fifty-year record is, in the end, what “IECON Proceedings” as a series title means.

How to Use This Series as a Reader

Engineers and researchers should search IECON as they search a journal: by topic, in IEEE Xplore or Scopus, letting the database surface the relevant years, then reading an individual paper as a six-page conference contribution — denser than a journal article, written to be presented, and often the first published form of work later extended in the society's journals such as the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics and the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. Tracing that conference-to-journal path is a standard literature-review move in this field: the IECON paper establishes priority and the community's first reaction; the journal extension carries the full analysis. For state-of-the-art surveys in power electronics, drives, industrial control and industrial AI, a search that omits IECON will miss a substantial part of the record, particularly of applied and industry-originated work that conferences attract earlier than journals do.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is IECON Proceedings a journal?

No. It is the proceedings series of IECON, the Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society. Papers are submitted to a yearly conference, reviewed by its programme committee, presented at the conference and published in that year's proceedings, which are submitted for inclusion in IEEE Xplore.

What are its ISSNs?

The continuing proceedings title is recorded with ISSNs 2577-1647 and 2162-4704; each year's proceedings volume also has its own ISBN as an IEEE conference publication. Cite the year and the paper's own identifiers, including its DOI where assigned.

Who organises IECON?

The IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES), whose flagship annual conference IECON is. A local organising committee and a technical programme committee run each edition under the society's oversight. Some secondary listings name the IEEE Computer Society in connection with this title; the sponsor of record is the Industrial Electronics Society, and that discrepancy is flagged in this profile for correction in the underlying directory record.

Where and when is the next edition?

On the society's published schedule, the 52nd Annual Conference, IECON 2026, is to be held 18–21 October 2026 in Doha, Qatar, following the 51st edition in Madrid, Spain (14–17 October 2025) and the 50th in Chicago, USA (3–6 November 2024). Always confirm dates and deadlines on the current edition's own website.

Does IECON charge an article processing charge?

There is no journal-style APC. Publication follows the conference model: an accepted paper must meet the edition's registration and presentation requirements, with fees set annually on the conference website. Do not record conference registration as an APC.

Does it have a Journal Impact Factor?

No — that metric applies to journals. Scopus-based indicators exist for the proceedings title and can be checked in SCImago with source and year; websites offering an “impact factor” for these proceedings are misusing the term.

What topics does it cover?

Industrial electronics in breadth: power electronics and energy conversion, machines and drives, renewable energy, smart grids, storage and electric transport; control, motion control, robotics and mechatronics, sensors and instrumentation; and industrial ICT — embedded systems, factory automation, industrial cyber-physical systems, communications, digital twins and AI for industry, including Industry 4.0/5.0 themes.

How long is a paper and in what format?

Recent calls specify regular papers in the IEEE two-column conference format, limited to six full pages including references, submitted as PDF through the edition's submission system. Check the current call, as limits and systems are set per edition.

Will my paper be in IEEE Xplore and Scopus?

Accepted and presented papers are published in the proceedings and submitted for inclusion in IEEE Xplore; the proceedings title is covered in Scopus. Inclusion of an individual paper should always be verified against its Xplore record after the conference.

How should I cite an IECON paper?

Authors, paper title, the conference name with its year and place (for example, IECON 2025, Madrid), page or article numbers in that year's proceedings, and the DOI where one is assigned — following IEEE citation style for conference papers.

Profile note (DEPTH-BATCH252): This profile is based on the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society's own conference pages and the published materials of recent IECON editions. Figures that change annually — registration fees, deadlines, committee rosters — are deliberately not stated as fixed facts and should be taken from the current edition's website. The sponsor discrepancy noted above (Industrial Electronics Society, not Computer Society) is recorded here as a flag for review of the site's structured data, which this content update does not alter.