# A Review of Cognitive Control: Advancement, Definition, Framework, and Prospect
## 8 Conclusions  
Cognitive control is a control method that is inspired by the human brain and human cognition. In this paper, the primary research results of cognitive control are reviewed and summarized; then, the general definition and framework are presented with an example to illustrate realization. Some relevant topics are also discussed, such as the main issues, the research directions, and the development prospects of cognitive control. In the final section of this paper, we list eleven major conclusions drawn from our study.  
* Cognitive control is a control method that establishes control systems based on the human cognition paradigm.
* Although cognitive control has been studied for several decades, the unified definition and method are still lacking, and cognitive control is far less mature than other general intelligent control methods.
* Cognitive control has been applied in many fields, such as manufacturing, humanoid robots, and transportation systems; although the existing cognitive architectures are different, they share common characteristics, i.e., based on various kinds of cognitive models.
* In this paper, cognitive control is defined from an automation perspective: cognitive control is a combination of automatic control and cognitive science; control systems are designed under the guidance of cognitive science theories to imitate human cognition's architecture and working process, obtaining and processing information as humans do.
* The main characteristic of cognitive control systems is that they contain two kinds of controller, i.e., a physical controller to perform physical actions and a cognitive controller to perform cognitive actions. The existence of cognitive controllers makes the control systems flexible to cope with uncertainties that the physical controllers are difficult to address.
* Cognitive control is different from the concepts of cognitive radio and cognitive radar.
* Cognitive control systems manifest intelligence in a way different from other intelligent control methods.
* Compared with robust control and adaptive control, cognitive control is more for engineering systems working in unknown and highly uncertain environments.
* The implementation of cognitive control makes higher demands for computing resources.
* With the popularization of Industry 4.0, the CPS has been widely used in engineering systems, and the uncertainties coming from the environment become non-negligible influences; cognitive control can be applied to situations such as NCSs, DCSs, and fault-tolerant control systems.
* Although cognitive control enhances the capability of traditional systems to cope with uncertainties, the performance and stability are hard to prove theoretically and so m more experiments should be conducted to verify its availability.  
**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, X.Y.; methodology, X.Y.; formal analysis, Z.L.; investigation, Z.L.; resources, X.Y. and Z.L.; data curation, Z.L.; writing--original draft preparation, Z.L.; writing--review and editing, X.Y.; supervision, X.Y. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
**Funding:** This research received no external funding.  
**Data Availability Statement:** No new data were created or analyzed in this study.  
**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflicts of interest.