Practile Design and Application
Practile Design and Application
Practile Design and Application
with the traditional and popular PID. Yet, it seems that the popularity of
MPC hasn’t gained much traction in many industries, such as the automotive
world. It is rarely cited that MPC solutions made their way into production
electronic modules for vehicles. The authors believe that this is primarily due
to the significant resources which are required to change existing procedures
in software development by switching to MPC, limited capability of automo-
tive electronic control units (ECUs) in terms of throughput and memory, as
well as the lack of automotive control engineers who are well versed in
MPC. Moreover vehicle manufacturers are still finding ways to design their
closed loop controllers without using MPC. Nontechnical budget holders in
the automotive world continuously pose questions such as: Why should we
change the controller if it works? Why do we need to invest in new proce-
dures to adopt MPC? Do customers care about having an MPC controller in
their vehicles instead of nested PID loops? These are all valid questions and
the challenge that technical leaders face is how to quantify control robustness
as cost savings. The authors believe that until the complexity level of design-
ing and tuning control software for automotive applications in particular, and
other industries in general, reaches unmanageable levels through traditional
control techniques, there will not be wide adoption of MPC in the industry.
In an attempt to understand the academic interest in MPC compared to other
traditional control techniques, the authors used books.google.com/ngrams
which scans a serious volume of books written in English. The authors searched
for the frequency of usage of the following case-insensitive keywords: Model
Predictive Control, PID Control, Sliding Mode Control, State Feedback
Control. Fig. 1.1 shows the search results from 1970 till 2008 no data was avail-
able after 2008. At the beginning of the millennia, the frequency of usage of
MPC surpassed PID as well as other control techniques. Fig. 1.1 is a good indi-
cation that there is an increasing academic interest in MPC, especially with the
increased interest in the internet of things (IoT) and smart devices.
The theme of this book is streamlining the design, tuning, and deploy-
ment process of linear MPC. This will allow a wider spread of a very
capable control strategy that the authors believe will be an essential part of
the technology revolution of IoT, smart devices, and digital twins. The meth-
odology the authors use to educate readers is through solving real world
applications. The control problems discussed in this book are challenging
and nonlinear. The authors spent a significant amount of time modeling the
dynamics of the presented problems as well as designing and tuning the
MPC controllers. Where possible, all the challenges the authors encountered
were documented so that readers can benefit from the lessons learned. The
challenges ranged from the system identification of the plant, design of MPC
in MATLAB and Simulink, the untold tuning art of MPC as well as simu-
lating the MPC with the nonlinear plant in Simulink. Except for Chapter 10,
all the plant models and the designed MPCs can be downloaded from the
book’s website. The authors believe in open-sources sharing to advance
science and promote model-based control approaches.
To enrich the expertise pool that contributed to the book, the authors
reached out to Dr. Sharif Aljoaba to leverage his experience in modeling and
control of photovoltaic cells.
All the examples provided in this book have been developed using
MATLAB R2017a. The toolboxes used are: Model Predictive Control and
System Identification. The operating system used is Windows 10, 64 bit. If
the reader doesn’t have MATLAB, he/she can contact Mathworks for a
trial version.
REFERENCE
[1] http://www.automationworld.com/process-control-software/pulppaper-and-power-gen-industries-
embrace-advanced-control
FURTHER READING
http://discover.rockwellautomation.com/Media/Files/Chlorine-DioxideAppProfile.pdf