Model predictive control: Review of the three decades of development

Three decades have passed since milestone publications by several industrialists spawned a flurry of research and industrial / commercial activities on model predictive control (MPC). This article reviews major developments and achievements during the three decades and attempts to put a perspective on them. The first decade is characterized by the fast-growing industrial adoption of the technology, primarily in the refining and petrochemical sectors, which sparked much interest and also confusion among the academicians. The second decade saw a number of significant advances in understanding the MPC from a control theoretician’s viewpoint, which included state-space interpretations / formulations and stability proofs. These theoretical triumphs contributed to the makings of the second generation of commercial software, which was significantly enhanced in generality and rigor. The third decade’s main focus has been on the development of “fast MPC,” a term chosen to collectively describe the various efforts to bring orders-of-magnitude improvement in the efficiency of the on-line computation so that the technology can be applied to systems requiring very fast sampling rates. Throughout the three decades of the development, theory and practice supported each other quite effectively, a primary reason for the fast and steady rise of the technology.