Stable nonlinear model predictive control with a changing economic criterion

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel stable economic model predictive control (EMPC) strategy for constrained nonlinear systems with changing economic criteria. The traditional EMPC may lead to infeasibility and even instability of the closed-loop system when the criterion has been changed. Firstly, a generalised terminal constraint is introduced to ensure the recursive feasibility of the economic optimisation problem, which enforces the terminal states to converge to an arbitrary equilibrium state rather than a predetermined fixed one at the initial time. Then the stability constraint is constructed by solving an auxiliary optimisation problem online, which is the key to guaranteeing the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system. Finally, sufficient conditions for feasibility and asymptotic stability are derived in the context of changing economic criteria. The main feature of the proposed strategy is that it does not need to know the changes of economic criterion in advance, and its properties and effectiveness are exemplified by simulations on a nonlinear chemical process example.

Keywords:

• Constrained nonlinear system
• model predictive control
• changing criteria
• recursive feasibility
• asymptotic stability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 61833007].