A comparison of methods to eliminate regularization weight tuning from data-enabled predictive control

Abstract: Data-enabled predictive control (DeePC) is a recently established form of Model Predictive Control (MPC), based on behavioral systems theory. While eliminating the need to explicitly identify a model, it requires an additional regularization with a corresponding weight to function well with noisy data. The tuning of this weight is non-trivial and has a significant impact on performance. In this paper, we compare three reformulations of DeePC that either eliminate the regularization, or simplify the tuning to a trivial point. A building simulation study shows a comparable performance for all three reformulations of DeePC. However, a conventional MPC with a black-box model slightly outperforms them, while solving much faster, and yielding smoother optimal trajectories. Two of the DeePC variants also show sensitivity to an unobserved biased input noise, which is not present in the conventional MPC.