Application set approximation in optimal input design for model predictive control

This contribution considers one central aspect of experiment design in system identification, namely application set approximation. When a control design is based on an estimated model, the achievable performance is related to the quality of the estimate. The degradation in control performance due to plant-modeling missmatch is quantified by an application cost function. A convex approximation of the set of models that satisfy the control specification is typically required in optimal input design. The standard approach is to use a quadratic approximation of the application cost function, where the main computational effort is to find the corresponding Hessian matrix. Our main contribution is an alternative approach for this problem, which uses the structure of the underlying optimal control problem to considerably reduce the computations needed to find the application set. This technique allows the use of applications oriented input design for MPC on much more complex plants. The approach is numerically evaluated on a distillation control problem.