CIESOL Celebrates the Prominent Role of Its Modeling and Control Division at the 47th Conference on Automation

Researchers and students associated with CIESOL’s Modeling and Control division played a leading role at the 47th Conference on Automation, held in Córdoba, where the University of Almería won two scientific and teaching awards, as well as first and second place in the Control Engineering Competition.

One of the most notable honors was the 2026 PRODEL Award for Best Educational Work in Automation, granted to the project “Democratizing Control Laboratories: The CE2Labs Initiative.” This initiative aims to facilitate access to control laboratories through more affordable, open-source, and reusable solutions, enabling a greater number of students to gain practical experience in control engineering.

Among the authors of the paper are several CIESOL researchers, including José Luis Guzmán Sánchez, Igor Mendes Lima Pataro, Enrique Rodríguez Miranda, Fernando Cañadas Aranega, José González Hernández, Manuel Muñoz Rodríguez, and Manuel Berenguel Soria, demonstrating the center’s commitment to educational innovation and excellence in training.

The research was also recognized with the award for Best Paper in the Control Engineering Session, granted to a study conducted in collaboration with Lund University. The paper proposes new methodologies to improve the performance of automatic systems when actuators reach their physical limits—a common situation in numerous industrial applications. The authors include José Luis Guzmán Sánchez, Igor Mendes Lima Pataro, and Manuel Berenguel Soria.

These successes also extended to the educational sphere. In the Control Engineering Competition—which brings together university students from across Spain to solve real-world modeling and automation challenges—University of Almería students Juan Sánchez Estrella and Francisco Pérez Ibáñez took first place in the Master’s category, while Adrián Zamora and Francisco Ferrer took second place in the undergraduate category. All teams were mentored by José Luis Guzmán Sánchez.

The Modeling and Control department’s participation also had an important social and outreach dimension. María del Mar Castilla Nieto collaborated on various initiatives aimed at fostering STEM careers among young people and increasing the visibility of women in engineering and research, helping to bring automation closer to new generations.

These results reflect CIESOL’s ability to combine excellence in research, educational innovation, student training, and a commitment to society, thereby consolidating the leadership of its Modeling and Control division within the national field of automation.