Predictive Control of Nonlinear Process

Concept of model based predictive control (MBPC) has been heralded as one of the most significant control developments in recent ten years. Wide range of choice of model structures, prediction horizon, and optimization criteria allows the designer to easily tailor MBPC to its application in industry. The main idea of Model Predictive Control (MPC) is the prediction of the output signal at each sampling instant. The prediction is implicit or explicit depending on the model of the process to be controlled. In the next step a control is selected to bring the predicted process output signal back to the reference signal in the way to minimize the area between the reference and the output signal. Within basic methods, which are essentially referred as predictive control, DMC and GPC with the added capability of handling nonlinear systems are included.