A FPGA implementation of model predictive control

With its natural ability in handling constraints, Model Predictive Control (MPC) has become an established control technology in the petrochemical industry, and its use is currently being pioneered in an increasingly wide range of process industries. It is also being proposed for a range of higher bandwidth applications, such as ships, aerospace and road vehicles. To extend its applications to miniaturized devices and/or embedded systems, this paper explores the implementation of the MPC technology into reconfigurable hardware such as a FPGA chip. A rapid prototyping environment suitable for exploring the various implementation issues to bring MPC onto a chip is described. Tests were conducted to verify the applicability of the "MPC on a Chip" idea. It is shown that a modest FPGA chip could be used to implement a reasonably sized constrained MPC controller.