Low-cost high-performance Predictive Control of drive systems with elastic coupling

Effective damping of torsional oscillations while guaranteeing desired speed response characteristics and satisfaction of safety and operational constraints remains the main challenge in control of modern industrial drive systems with elastic couplings. This paper investigates the application of an explicit approach to the design of Model Predictive Control (MPC) for the drive system with elastic coupling. The resulting explicit MPC controller achieves the same level of performance as the conventional MPC, but requires only a fraction of the real-time computational machinery, thus leading to fast and reliable implementation. The main advantage of the proposed approach is that the drive physical and safety limitations can be directly incorporated into the control problem formulation and thus enforced explicitly during the operation of the controller. The results are compared to the current state of the art demonstrating the potential for notable performance improvements.