Artificial neural network based model predictive control: Implementing achievable set‐points

Abstract This paper addresses the problem of determining achievable set‐points for artificial neural network (ANN)‐based model predictive control (MPC) designs. In particular, this work considers a case where a first‐principles model may not be readily available for a nonlinear process, while sufficient closed‐loop data containing possibly correlated outputs is available, such that an ANN‐based model that captures the nonlinear dynamics reasonably well can be identified. The paper addresses implementation aspects with such an ANN‐based MPC design—specifically that of ensuring that achievable set‐points are prescribed to the MPC. The key idea is to perform principal component analysis (PCA) on the training data in order to recognize existing collinearity and determine the upper confidence limit of squared prediction error (SPE) statistic. An optimization problem subject to the SPE constraint is then defined to calculate the achievable set‐points, that can in turn be provided to an MPC design. The efficacy of the proposed approach is illustrated via implementations on a chemical reactor example. The results reveal the superior tracking performance of MPC using the achievable set‐points over the case where arbitrarily prescribed set‐points are used in the MPC implementations.