This talk is about economic model predictive control (EMPC), a modern receding horizon based control technique that minimizes at each sampling instance an economic objective on a moving horizon subject to model dynamics and, optionally, control and state constraints. The first part of the talk gives an introduction to EMPC discussing state-of-the-art approaches. In particular, we outline the current status of stability analysis of EMPC and provide an overview of the large number of important open problems in this context. The second part of the talk is about a novel approach that uses phase independent terminal constraints and a terminal cost, which allow us to enforce the asymptotic orbital stability of EMPC under reasonable assumptions on the controllability and well-posedness of the problem. This approach does---in contrast to many existing approaches---not rely on any dissipativity assumptions. We provide an associated orbital Lyapunov function that is employed for proving stability. Various numerical case studies will also be presented.
Boris Houska received a diploma in mathematics and physics from the University of Heidelberg in 2007, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from KU Leuven in 2011. From 2012 to 2013 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Process Systems Engineering at Imperial College London. Boris Houska joined the Department of Automation at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in April 2013 where he worked as a lecturer and, from January 2014 on, as an associate professor with research focus. In August and September 2014 he is working as a guest professor at the Institute for Microsystems Engineering at the University of Freiburg. Boris Houska is planning to join ShanghaiTech University as a founding faculty member in October 2014.