Teaching MPC: Which Way to the Promised Land?

TL;DR

This paper discusses the evolution, current state, and challenges of teaching Model Predictive Control (MPC) across different educational levels, emphasizing the need for effective pedagogical strategies amid its complexity.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive discussion on how to teach MPC effectively at undergraduate and graduate levels, considering its broad scope and recent advancements.

Findings

MPC has evolved from simple linear to complex nonlinear and data-driven methods.

Teaching MPC requires balancing foundational concepts with recent research developments.

The paper advocates for structured curricula to better prepare students for advanced MPC topics.

Abstract

Since the earliest conceptualizations by Lee and Markus, and Propoi in the 1960s, Model Predictive Control (MPC) has become a major success story of systems and control with respect to industrial impact and with respect to continued and wide-spread research interest. The field has evolved from conceptually simple linear-quadratic (convex) settings in discrete and continuous time to nonlinear and distributed settings including hybrid, stochastic, and infinite-dimensional systems. Put differently, essentially the entire spectrum of dynamic systems can be considered in the MPC framework with respect to both -- system theoretic analysis and tailored numerics. Moreover, recent developments in machine learning also leverage MPC concepts and learning-based and data-driven MPC have become highly active research areas. However, this evident and continued success renders it increasingly complex to live up to industrial expectations while enabling graduate students for state-of-the-art research in teaching MPC. Hence, this position paper attempts to trigger a discussion on teaching MPC. To lay the basis for a fruitful debate, we subsequently investigate the prospect of covering MPC in undergraduate courses; we comment on teaching textbooks; and we discuss the increasing complexity of research-oriented graduate teaching of~MPC.