Dynamic Safety Constraints by Scenario-Based Economic Model Predictive Control of Marine Electric Power Plants

This paper studies scenario-based model predictive control (MPC) for dynamic safety constraints. For marine electric power plant with direct current distribution and variable speed generator set, the speed of the generator sets should be as low as possible to increase the efficiency of the diesel engines. However, a safety margin toward underspeed is necessary. In this paper, a dynamical safety constraint is achieved by including a fault scenario in the MPC formulation. This is done using a nominal trajectory of the predicted states for the fault-free operation, and adding fault trajectories starting from the samples of the nominal trajectory. The fault trajectories simulate the fault scenario and dynamically constrain the nominal trajectory. The controller is shown to be effective using closed-loop simulations of a marine electric power plant.