In 1946, the mechanical engineer at a company in the United States first proposed the word "automation" and used to describe the process of automatic transmission and machining of engine cylinders. In the 1950s, the development of automatic regulators and classical control theory led automation to the phase of partial automation dominated by univariate automatic regulation systems. In the 1960s, with the advent of modern control theory and the popularization and application of electronic computers, automatic control and information processing were combined to bring automation into the integrated automation stage of optimal control and management of the production process.

In the 1970s, the object of automation became a large-scale, complex engineering and non-engineering system, involving many problems that were difficult to solve with modern control theory. The research of these problems has promoted the innovation of the theory, method and means of automation. So the system control of large system and the intelligent control of complex system appeared. The advanced of synthesizing the achievements of computer, communication technology, system engineering and artificial intelligence appeared Automation systems, such as flexible manufacturing systems, office automation, intelligent robots, expert systems, decision support systems, computer integrated manufacturing systems.

The emergence and application of automation equipment was in the 18th century. The formation of automation technology in the late 18th century ~ 1930s. In 1788 British mechanic invented the centrifugal governor (also known as fly ball governor), and it is connected with the steam engine valve to form a closed loop steam engine speed control system.

This invention pioneered a new era of modern automation equipment applications that had a major impact on the development of the first industrial revolution and later on control theory. People began to use automation equipment to deal with the control issues raised in industrial production.

These regulators are devices that track a given value, keeping some of the physical quantities near a given value. Auto-regulator applications mark the beginning of a new era in automation technology. Since the 20th century, various kinds of automatic adjustment equipment have been widely used in industrial production, which has promoted the research and analysis of the regulation system. Although the structure of feedback control has been widely used in automatic regulators during this period, the theory of feedback control has been studied theoretically since the 1920s.

In 1833, British mathematicians first proposed the principle of program control when designing the analysis machine. In 1939, the world's first batch of systems and control professional research institutions was established, making theoretical and organizational preparations for the formation of classical control theory and the development of partial automation in the 1940s.