Predictive Control

10Applications of Predictive Control

It is well recognized that predictive control has not resulted from the development of control theory, but was promoted by the requirements of complex industrial processes on optimization control. It appeared in the industrial field as a kind of new control technology from the date of birth. Early in the 1970s predictive control was successfully applied in process industries such as oil refinery, chemical, and power industries, and exhibited an excellent capability of handling complex constrained optimization problems. Since then, with the improvement and generalization of commercial predictive control software, predictive control has been successfully applied to thousands of large industrial facilities. It is widely accepted in the industrial process control field as the core of advanced process control (APC), and is even regarded as the only control technology that can handle the multivariable constrained optimization in a systematical and intuitive way. Since entering this century, with the increasing requirements on the constrained optimization control for complex systems, the application of predictive control rapidly expanded to advanced manufacturing, power electronics, energy, environment, medical, and other fields. In this chapter, we will firstly give an overview of predictive control industrial applications and introduce the key technologies of its implementation in industrial processes, before giving a brief overall description ...