Combined economic and regulatory predictive control

A combined economic and regulatory Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework, referred to as dual-objective MPC, is presented. Economic and regulatory cost objectives are combined using an explicitly defined dynamic weight function. The features embedded in the weight function allow for increased economic online performance during process transients, while simultaneously steering the process to an optimal economic steady-state. The proposed strategy gives an online optimization problem of same type as typical nonlinear MPC formulations, with the same number of variables. Increased economic transient performance is illustrated for an acetylene hydrogenation case, when compared to regulatory MPC. A link to dissipativity theory for the presented dual-objective MPC strategy concludes the work.