Theodore J. Williams
Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Director Emeritus of the Purdue Laboratory for Applied Industrial Control (PLAIC) at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.
Professor WIlliams served actively in these positions from 1965 through 1994. He received the B.S., M.S., and
Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering from the Pennsylvania State University and the M.S. degree in electrical
engineering from Ohio State University.
Before joining the staff at Purdue, Dr. Williams was senior engineering supervisor and was responsible
for the computer control research program at the Monsanto Chemical Co., St. Louis, Missouri, as well as Visiting
Professor for Automatic Control at Washington University in St. Louis.
The major research program of PLAIC was in the solution of industrial problems in the control field.
Concentration here was in the solution of these problems through the application of control computer technology,
especially their use in plant-wide or overall control systems. (This latter field is maturing today as enterprise
integration.)
PLAIC has been the source of its Purdue Reference Model for Computer Interated Manufacturing (CIM) and
the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture (PERA). Professor Williams has been primarily responsible for both
developments.
More recently, Professor Williams was the organizer and first Chairman of the IFAC/IFIP Task Force in Architectures
for Enterprise Integration. He also serves on the ISO/TC 184/SC5/WG1 in this same area.
Professor Williams' continuing interests in the enterprise integration field is in the development of application
methodologies which can lead to wide-spread adoption of these technologies in industy and the general acceptance
by companies in all industries of these techniques.