Computational techniques for model predictive control of large-scale systems with continuous-valued and discrete-valued inputs

We propose computational techniques for model predictive control of large-scale systems with both continuous-valued control inputs and discrete-valued control inputs,which are a class of hybrid systems. in the proposed method,we introduce the notion of virtual control inputs,which are obtained by relaxing discrete-valued control inputs to continuous variables. in online computation,first,we find continuous-valued control inputs and virtual control inputs minimizing a cost function. next,using the obtained virtual control inputs,only discrete-valued control inputs at the current time are computed in each subsystem. in addition,we also discuss the effect of quantization errors. finally,the effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by a numerical example. the proposed method enables us to reduce and decentralize the computation load. © 2013 koichi kobayashi and kunihiko hiraishi.