Experimental Evaluation of a MIMO Adaptive Dual MPC

Maintaining uniformly satisfactory control performance of an MPC scheme in the face of changing operating conditions is a difficult task. An adaptive MPC scheme that directs the output towards a reference and simultaneously injects a probing signal to get more information about the system for better model identification appears to be ideally suited for achieving this goal. In this work, taking motivation from the dual control problem originally developed by Feldbaum [1960], a MIMO adaptive dual MPC (adaptive DMPC) formulation has been proposed, which does not require external probing signals to improve the model parameter estimates. The objective function of the MPC is modified to include terms that ensure that sufficient excitation is injected into the system while performing the control tasks. The efficacy of the proposed adaptive DMPC formulation is evaluated by conducting experimental studies on the benchmark heater mixer system. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed formulation is able to inject probing inputs of small magnitude while meeting the desired servo and regulatory control objectives.