Model Predictive Control in Industry: Challenges and Opportunities

With decades of successful application of model predictive control (MPC) to industrial processes, practitioners are now focused on ease of commissioning, monitoring, and automation of maintenance. Many industries do not necessarily need better algorithms, but rather improved usability of existing technologies to allow a limited workforce of varying expertise to easily commission, use, and maintain these valued applications. Continuous performance monitoring, and automated model reidentification are being used as vendors work to deliver automated adaptive MPC. This paper examines industrial practice and emerging research trends towards providing sustained MPC performance.