Model predictive control of a CSTR: A hybrid modeling approach

This paper presents a case study of model predictive control (MPC) applied to a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR). It is proposed to approximate nonlinear behavior of a plant by several local linear models, enabling a piecewise affine (PWA) description of the model used to predict and optimize future evolution of the reactor behavior. Main advantage of the PWA model over traditional approaches based on single linearization is a significant increase of model accuracy which leads to a better control quality. It is also illustrated that, by adopting the PWA modeling framework, MPC strategy can be implemented using significantly less computational power compared to nonlinear MPC setups.