Opportunities and Challenges in the Application of Nonlinear MPC to Industrial Problems

Linear MPC has been a major success story in industry. Arguably this is due to its capacity to deal with constraints and its seamless treatment of multivariable problems. Nonlinear MPC has also been extensively studied and advocated as a practical control strategy for processes whose dynamics are inherently nonlinear. In this paper we examine two industrial case studies to illustrate the power of nonlinear MPC in practice. We also use these case studies to point to future research challenges and opportunities.