Recent advancements on MPC for tracking: periodic and harmonic formulations

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent MPC formulations that incorporate artificial references to ensure stability and feasibility even with changing or infeasible user references, enhancing performance and robustness.

Contribution

It introduces recent advancements in MPC that add an artificial reference as a decision variable, guaranteeing stability and feasibility regardless of user reference issues.

Findings

Formulations achieve asymptotic stability and recursive feasibility.

Enhanced performance with smaller prediction horizons.

Illustrative examples demonstrate benefits over classical MPC.

Abstract

The main benefit of model predictive control (MPC) is its ability to steer the system to a given reference without violating the constraints while minimizing some objective. Furthermore, a suitably designed MPC controller guarantees asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system to the given reference as long as its optimization problem is feasible at the initial state of the system. Therefore, one of the limitations of classical MPC is that changing the reference may lead to an unfeasible MPC problem. Furthermore, due to a lack of deep knowledge of the system, it is possible for the user to provide a desired reference that is unfeasible or non-attainable for the MPC controller, leading to the same problem. This chapter summarizes MPC formulations recently proposed that have been designed to address these issues. In particular, thanks to the addition of an artificial reference as decision variable, the formulations achieve asymptotic stability and recursive feasibility guarantees regardless of the reference provided by the user, even if it is changed online or if it violates the system constraints. We show a recent formulation which extends this idea, achieving better performance and larger domains of attraction when working with small prediction horizons. Additional benefits of these formulations, when compared to classical MPC, are also discussed and highlighted with illustrative examples.