Robust Model Predictive Control and Distributed Model Predictive Control: Feasibility and Stability

An increasing number of applications ranging from multi-vehicle systems, largescale process control systems, transportation systems to smart grids call for the development of cooperative control theory. Meanwhile, when designing the cooperative controller, the state and control constraints, ubiquitously existing in the physical system, have to be respected. Model predictive control (MPC) is one of a few techniques that can explicitly and systematically handle the state and control constraints. This dissertation studies the robust MPC and distributed MPC strategies, respectively. Specifically, the problems we investigate are: the robust MPC for linear or nonlinear systems, distributed MPC for constrained decoupled systems and distributed MPC for constrained nonlinear systems with coupled system dynamics. In the robust MPC controller design, three sub-problems are considered. Firstly, a computationally efficient multi-stage suboptimal MPC strategy is designed by exploiting the j-step admissible sets, where the j-step admissible set is the set of system states that can be steered to the maximum positively invariant set in j control steps.