A Family of High-Performance Solvers for Linear Model Predictive Control

In Model Predictive Control (MPC), an optimization problem has to be solved at each sampling time, and this has traditionally limited the use of MPC to systems with slow dynamic. In this paper, we propose an efficient solution strategy for the unconstrained subproblems that give the search-direction in Interior-Point (IP) methods for MPC, and that usually are the computational bottle-neck. This strategy combines a Riccati-like solver with the use of high-performance computing techniques: in particular, in this paper we explore the performance boost given by the use of single precision computation, and techniques such as inexact search direction and mixed precision computation. Finally, we test our HPMPC toolbox, a family of high-performance solvers tailored for MPC and implemented using these techniques, that is shown to be several times faster than current state-of-the-art solvers for linear MPC.