The ninth annual IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE 2013) was held on August 17-21, 2013, at the Madison Concourse Hotel and Governor’s Club, Madison, Wisconsin, USA. IEEE CASE represents the flagship automation conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and constitutes the primary forum for cross-industry and multidisciplinary research in automation. The conference theme is Automation in Practice. Its goal is to provide a broad coverage and dissemination of foundational research in automation among researchers, academics, and practitioners.

This special issue is by invitation only. It will contain fuller treatments of some of the outstanding papers presented at CASE 2013.

The 2013 Edition of IEEE CASE covers the topics from Foundations of Automation; Agriculture; Life Sciences; Health Care; Automation in Meso, Micro and Nano-scale; Manufacturing Automation; Discrete Event Systems; Scheduling and Optimization; Mechatronics; Laboratory Automation; Sustainable Production; Logistics and Supply Chain Management; Networked and Control Systems; to Power and Energy Systems; Smart Buildings; Big Data and Data Mining; Industrial Informatics; and other Emerging Topics in Automation.