Abstract
This paper is to review and summarize the past 30 years in application of automatic controls into resources processing, mainly mineral processing. The trend beyond 30 years ago was already reported on the MMIJ journals published in those days. The early seventies seem to be one of the significant milestones in the history of automatic control theory. That is to say, the so-called modern control theory had been established and became to be applied into practice.
Many plants of different industries other than mineral processing have positively adopted the highly developed deterministic control theories including the classical as well as the modern ones. Most of mineral processing plants have been rather negative in applying them. It is thought because a mineral processing plant usually involves its specific characteristics: e.g. uncertain, stochastic, nonlinear, interactive multivariable ones.
The favorable factors for automation of mineral processing can be found, however, in recent development of non-deterministic or knowledge-based, i.e. linguistic or stochastic control strategies introducing fuzzy logics, GA (Genetic Algorithm), ANN (Artificial Neural Network), expert system etc., all of which are supported by modern computer technology.
The trend mentioned above has been figured out by mentioning different examples extracted from the references, which were available for the authors, but may not necessarily be enough as a bibliography concerned.
