Parallel Explicit Model Predictive Control

Abstract: This paper is about a real-time model predictive control (MPC) algorithm for large-scale, structured linear systems with polytopic state and control constraints. The proposed controller receives the current state measurement as an input and computes a sub-optimal control reaction by evaluating a finite number of piecewise affine functions that correspond to the explicit solution maps of small-scale parametric quadratic programming (QP) problems. We provide recursive feasibility and asymptotic stability guarantees, which can both be verified offline. The feedback controller is suboptimal on purpose because we are enforcing real-time requirements assuming that it is impossible to solve the given large-scale QP in the given amount of time. In this context, a key contribution of this paper is that we provide a bound on the sub-optimality of the controller. Our numerical simulations illustrate that the proposed explicit real-time scheme easily scales up to systems with hundreds of states and long control horizons, system sizes that are completely out of the scope of existing, non-suboptimal Explicit MPC controllers.