Technical notes and correspondence - Combined design of disturbance model and observer for offset-free model predictive control

This note presents a method for the combined design of an integrating disturbance model and of the observer (for the augmented system) to be used in offset-free model predictive controllers. A dynamic observer is designed for the original (nonaugmented) system by solving an H-infinity control, problem aimed at minimizing the effect of unmeasured disturbances and plant/model mismatch on the output prediction error. It is shown that, when offset-free control is sought, the dynamic observer is equivalent to choosing an integrating disturbance model and an observer for the augmented system. An example of a chemical reactor shows the main features and benefits of the proposed method.