Abstract
The control engineer of today is seemingly a man of many rare virtues and attributes: he combines practical realism with ingenuity; he is a man of vision and of high intellectual calibre. Given an understanding of his company's objectives and restraints, he can engineer a productive unit in conjunction with process and other specialists, to meet its target, on specification, on quantity, with safety and with the automatic generation and preparation of the necessary production statistics.
In recent years several universities have followed the lead set by Cambridge with postgraduate and later, as at City University, first degree courses in control engineering. From the start BP has been a consistent supporter of these courses and several of the postgraduate trainees and ex-university apprentices, having read this relatively new subject, are in Control Engineering Branch. There they meet the intellectual challenge of applying the full power of modern technology on a broad front of the company's operations in production, refining and distributing.
The control engineer's dream is not of automatons nor of refineries without human beings: he is concerned with giving refinery management a reliable mechanism through which to attain its objectives as efficiently as possible.
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