Enlarging the domain of attraction of MPC controllers

In this paper, the MPC formulation with terminal cost and constraint is modified, replacing the terminal constraint by a contractive terminal constraint. This constraint is given by a sequence of sets computed off-line that is based on the positively invariant set. Each set of this sequence does not need to be an invariant set and can be computed by a procedure which provides an inner approximation to the one-step set. This property allows us to use one-step approximations with a trade off between accuracy and computational burden for the computation of the sequence. This strategy guarantees closed loop-stability ensuring the enlargement of the domain of attraction and the local optimality of the controller. Moreover, this idea can be directly translated to robust MPC.