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The article announces the recipient for the 2005 IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award presented at the Awards Ceremony of the Society during the 44th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Seville, Spain on December 14, 2005. The winning research titled "Worst-Case and Distributional Robustness Analysis of Finite-Time Control Trajectories for Nonlinear Distributed Parameter Systems," by Zoltan K. Nagy and Richard D. Braatz was selected among the papers published in the 2003-2004 issues of the journal. It also calls for nominations for the 2006 IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award covering the period from January 2004 to December 2005 issues of the journal.

This paper describes the configuration, modeling, and control of a fuel cell (FC)-battery-powered hybrid system for the Metro Centro tramway in Seville, Spain. The proposed hybrid system presents a polymer electrolyte membrane FC as the primary energy source and a nickel-metal hydride cell battery as the secondary energy source, which supplements the output of the FC during tramway acceleration or whenever else needed and cruise and for energy recovery during braking. The tramway presents a traction system which is composed of four traction induction motor drives. The hybrid system also supplies the power for the auxiliary services. The power conditioning system is composed of two converters: 1) a boost-type unidirectional dc/dc converter for the FC and 2) a boost-type bidirectional dc/dc converter for the battery. The energy management system (EMS) of the hybrid tramway determines the reference signals for the electric motor drives, FC, and power converters in order to regulate accurately the power from the two electrical sources. EMS also determines the reference signal for energy dissipation in braking chopper when required during regenerative braking. In this paper, the proposed hybrid system is evaluated for the real driving cycle of the tramway. The results demonstrate the hybrid system capability to meet appropriate driving cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]