MPC for continuous piecewise-affine systems

Reference:
B. De Schutter and T.J.J. van den Boom, "MPC for continuous piecewise-affine systems," Systems & Control Letters, vol. 52, no. 3-4, pp. 179-192, July 2004.

Abstract:
A large class of hybrid systems can be described by a max-min-plus-scaling (MMPS) model (i.e., using the operations maximization, minimization, addition and scalar multiplication). First, we show that continuous piecewise-affine systems are equivalent to MMPS systems. Next, we consider model predictive control (MPC) for these systems. In general, this leads to nonlinear, nonconvex optimization problems. We present a new MPC method for MMPS systems that is based on canonical forms for MMPS functions. In case the MPC constraints are linear constraints in the inputs only, this results in a sequence of linear optimization problems such that the MPC control can often be computed in a much more efficient way than by just applying nonlinear optimization as was done in previous work.