Dr. Klaus Werner Schmidt is currently a Professor. at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. He received his Ph.D in Engineering Sciences at the Technical Faculty of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He is an Associate Editor of "Discrete Event Dynamic Systems: Theory and Applications" as well as the "Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences". He was a Member of the Program Committee of the Workshop on Discrete Event Systems 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018. He was awarded Outstanding Reviewer for the IEEE Trans on Automatic Control. Moreover, He is also an Associate Editor for the IFAC World Congress 2017 (representing the IFAC Technical Committee 1.3 on Discrete Event and Hybrid Systems). In recent years, Prof. Schmidt's main research interests include decentralized and hierarchical control of discrete event systems, reconfiguration of manufacturing system behavior specifications, and adaptive cruise control of vehicles. Prof. Schmidt has published over 100 papers.

The rapid reconfiguration of manufacturing systems is an important issue in today’s manufacturing technology in order to adjust the production to varying product demands and types. In this context, reconfiguration control of discrete event systems (DES) is concerned with changing the supervisory controller during run-time depending on the active system configuration. Hereby, several requirements have to be taken into account. First, the desired operation has to be realized in each configuration. Second, configuration changes should be possible when requested and should be performed as fast as possible. Third, a suitable design approach should be applicable to large-scale systems.