NONLINEAR MODEL PREDICTIVE CONTROL FOR OPTIMAL DISCONTINUOUS DRUG DELIVERY

This paper exploits a gradient-based model predictive control technique to solve an optimal switching time problem over periodic orbits. Drug delivery scheduling applications, where it is desired to maximize the averaged effect of a drug over time, motivate the study for this type of online optimization problem. The objective is to find the optimal time-switching policy between full treatment and no treatment periods. It is shown, by a numerical application to a simple drug delivery problem, that the resulting predictive algorithm drives the system to the optimal periodic orbit in the state space.