Explicit coordination for MPC-based distributed control with application to Hydro-Power Valleys

This paper discusses a decomposition-coordination control approach for large-scale systems, based on distributed MPC controllers and a specific coordination, with an application to the control of a so-called Hydro-Power Valley. The coordination strategy here explored can be characterized as an explicit interaction-prediction method, in the sense that the coordinator distributes predicted interactions to each subsystem on the basis of the information collected from those subsystems on the one hand, and takes advantage of explicit solutions for linear MPC control to globally update those predictions on the other hand. It is emphasized in the paper how this makes the approach suitable for real-time implementation, constraint handling, and communication limitations. In particular promising simulation results are provided for an industrial based Hydro-Power Valley case-study, chosen for the purpose of illustration, but using real data from French main electricity provider EDF.