Predictive Control of Power Converters and Electrical Drives

3.2 Basic Principles of Model Predictive Control

Among the advanced control techniques, that is, more advanced than standard PID control, MPC is one that has been successfully used in industrial applications [7–9]. Although the ideas of MPC were developed in the 1960s as an application of optimal control theory, industrial interest in these ideas started in the late 1970s [10]. Since then, MPC has been successfully applied in the chemical process industry, where time constants are long enough to perform all the required calculations. Early applications of the ideas of MPC in power electronics can be found from the 1980s considering high-power systems with low switching frequency [2]. The use of higher switching frequencies was not possible at that time due to the large calculation time required for the control algorithm. However, with the development of fast and powerful microprocessors, interest in the application of MPC in power electronics has increased considerably over the last decade.

MPC describes a wide family of controllers, not a specific control strategy [7]. The common elements of this kind of controller are that it uses a model of the system to predict the future behavior of the variables until a predefined horizon in time, and selection of the optimal actuations by minimizing a cost function. This structure has several important advantages:

• Concepts are very intuitive and easy to understand.
• It can be applied to a great variety of systems.
• The multivariable case ...