Model Predictive control of Depth of Anaesthesia: Guidelines for controller configuration

The paper presents a feasibility study on the use of Model based Predictive control (MPC) to regulate the level of Depth of Anaesthesia (DoA) when measured by the BIS index. Pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic nonlinear models of DoA when Propofol and Remifentanil are used as hypnotic and analgesic drugs are linearized around the desired working point for DoA in order to obtain a linear state-space model coupled with an extra integrator to include integral action in the control. This state-space model is then used in a MPC algorithm. The main contribution of the paper consists in the characterization of the influence of the different design parameters in the MPC performance when controlling DoA.