Predictive metamorphic control

Model Predictive Control (MPC) has become widely accepted in industry. The reason for its success are manifold including easy implementation, ability to handle constraints, capacity to deal with nonlinearities, etc. However, the method does have drawbacks including tuning difficulties. In this paper, we propose an embellishment to the basic MPC strategy by incorporating a tuning parameter such that one can move continuously from an existing controller to a new MPC strategy. The continuous change of this tuning parameter leads to a continuously varying stabilizing control law. Since the proposed strategy allows one to slowly move from an existing control law to a new and better one, we term the strategy Predictive Metamorphic Control. For the case of an infinite horizon problem without constraints and for the general case with state and input constraints, stability results are established. The merits of the proposed method are illustrated by examples.