The 2nd IFAC Workshop "New Trends in Design of Control Systems" was organized by the Slovak Society of Cybernetics and Informatics (which is the Slovak IFAC National Member Organization) on 7-10 September 1997 and was sponsored by the IFAC Technical Committee on Control Design.The aim of this Workshop was to bring together experts in various theoretical and applied areas of Control Theory to review recent advances and to anticipate major future developments of the discipline. The Workshop attracted more than a hundred authors from which 92 presented their contributions in Smolenice.Areas covered included linear and nonlinear control system design; large scale systems and decentralized control; intelligent controllers, neural, fuzzy and genetic control design; adaptive and selftuning control; control of discrete event systems; and control design problems in robotics and manufacturing.The high professional level of the papers presented at both IFAC Workshops (held in 1994 and 1997) outlined new directions in Control Theory development and their applications in practice.