No Arabic abstract
This paper presents an efficient suboptimal model predictive control (MPC) algorithm for nonlinear switched systems subject to minimum dwell time constraints (MTC). While MTC are required for most physical systems due to stability, power and mechanical restrictions, MPC optimization problems with MTC are challenging to solve. To efficiently solve such problems, the on-line MPC optimization problem is decomposed into a sequence of simpler problems, which include two nonlinear programs (NLP) and a rounding step, as typically done in mixed-integer optimal control (MIOC). Unlike the classical approach that embeds MTC in a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) with combinatorial constraints in the rounding step, our proposal is to embed the MTC in one of the NLPs using move blocking. Such a formulation can speedup on-line computations by employing recent move blocking algorithms for NLP problems and by using a simple sum-up-rounding (SUR) method for the rounding step. An explicit upper bound of the integer approximation error for the rounding step is given. In addition, a combined shrinking and receding horizon strategy is developed to satisfy closed-loop MTC. Recursive feasibility is proven using a $l$-step control invariant ($l$-CI) set, where $l$ is the minimum dwell time step length. An algorithm to compute $l$-CI sets for switched linear systems off-line is also presented. Numerical studies demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed MPC algorithm for switched nonlinear systems with MTC.
This paper deals with the stability analysis problem of discrete-time switched linear systems with ranged dwell time. A novel concept called L-switching-cycle is proposed, which contains sequences of multiple activation cycles satisfying the prescribed ranged dwell time constraint. Based on L-switching-cycle, two sufficient conditions are proposed to ensure the global uniform asymptotic stability of discrete-time switched linear systems. It is noted that two conditions are equivalent in stability analysis with the same $L$-switching-cycle. These two sufficient conditions can be viewed as generalizations of the clock-dependent Lyapunov and multiple Lyapunov function methods, respectively. Furthermore, it has been proven that the proposed L-switching-cycle can eventually achieve the nonconservativeness in stability analysis as long as a sufficiently long L-switching-cycle is adopted. A numerical example is provided to illustrate our theoretical results.
Switched systems in which the manipulated control action is the time-depending switching signal describe many engineering problems, mainly related to biomedical applications. In such a context, to control the system means to select an autonomous system - at each time step - among a given finite family. Even when this selection can be done by solving a Dynamic Programming (DP) problem, such a solution is often difficult to apply, and state/control constraints cannot be explicitly considered. In this work a new set-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) strategy is proposed to handle switched systems in a tractable form. The optimization problem at the core of the MPC formulation consists in an easy-to-solve mixed-integer optimization problem, whose solution is applied in a receding horizon way. Two biomedical applications are simulated to test the controller: (i) the drug schedule to attenuate the effect of viral mutation and drugs resistance on the viral load, and (ii) the drug schedule for Triple Negative breast cancer treatment. The numerical results suggest that the proposed strategy outperform the schedule for available treatments.
Move blocking (MB) is a widely used strategy to reduce the degrees of freedom of the Optimal Control Problem (OCP) arising in receding horizon control. The size of the OCP is reduced by forcing the input variables to be constant over multiple discretization steps. In this paper, we focus on developing computationally efficient MB schemes for multiple shooting based nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC). The degrees of freedom of the OCP is reduced by introducing MB in the shooting step, resulting in a smaller but sparse OCP. Therefore, the discretization accuracy and level of sparsity is maintained. A condensing algorithm that exploits the sparsity structure of the OCP is proposed, that allows to reduce the computation complexity of condensing from quadratic to linear in the number of discretization nodes. As a result, active-set methods with warm-start strategy can be efficiently employed, thus allowing the use of a longer prediction horizon. A detailed comparison between the proposed scheme and the nonuniform grid NMPC is given. Effectiveness of the algorithm in reducing computational burden while maintaining optimization accuracy and constraints fulfillment is shown by means of simulations with two different problems.
We propose an extension of the theory of control sets to the case of inputs satisfying a dwell-time constraint. Although the class of such inputs is not closed under concatenation, we propose a suitably modified definition of control sets that allows to recover some important properties known in the concatenable case. In particular we apply the control set construction to dwell-time linear switched systems, characterizing their maximal Lyapunov exponent looking only at trajectories whose angular component is periodic. We also use such a construction to characterize supports of invariant measures for random switched systems with dwell-time constraints.
We present a data-driven model predictive control (MPC) scheme for chance-constrained Markov jump systems with unknown switching probabilities. Using samples of the underlying Markov chain, ambiguity sets of transition probabilities are estimated which include the true conditional probability distributions with high probability. These sets are updated online and used to formulate a time-varying, risk-averse optimal control problem. We prove recursive feasibility of the resulting MPC scheme and show that the original chance constraints remain satisfied at every time step. Furthermore, we show that under sufficient decrease of the confidence levels, the resulting MPC scheme renders the closed-loop system mean-square stable with respect to the true-but-unknown distributions, while remaining less conservative than a fully robust approach. Finally, we show that the data-driven value function converges to its nominal counterpart as the sample size grows to infinity. We illustrate our approach on a numerical example.