Economic MPC with Terminal Cost and Application to Oilsand Separation

In this work, a novel approach to construct the terminal cost for economic model predictive control (EMPC) is developed. In the proposed approach, an auxiliary nonlinear controller which renders the desired optimal steady state asymptotically stable is taken advantage of. The proposed terminal cost is constructed such that it reflects the economic performance of the auxiliary controller over sufficiently large but finite steps. The proposed EMPC design provides guaranteed closed-loop economic performance which does not depend on the length of the prediction horizon. This means that the proposed EMPC algorithm could be very computationally efficient. The proposed EMPC algorithm is applied to an oilsand primary separation vessel. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.