Low-complexity digital architecture for solving the point location problem in explicit Model Predictive Control

This paper describes a digital circuit architecture which implements a recently proposed algorithm for the solution of the point location problem in the evaluation of piecewise affine functions. The circuit is suitable for FPGA implementation of explicit Model Predictive Control. The performances of the architecture are tested in a case study through hardware-in-the-loop simulation. Results show that the proposed circuit can be implemented on limited hardware resources also for quite complex, possibly discontinuous control functions, thus representing a good spare solution when other existing circuit architectures (generally faster but more resource-demanding) cannot be deployed.