Piecewise affine modeling and control of a boiler–turbine unit

In this paper, a discrete-time piecewise affine (PWA) model has been proposed for a nonlinear model of boiler–turbine unit using plant operating points. PWA model is one of the main classes of hybrid systems being equivalent to some other hybrid modeling frameworks such as mixed logical dynamical (MLD) model. In order to control the system, a model predictive control (MPC) strategy in explicit form has been used which calculates the control law as an affine function of system states. In this method, the computation of MPC is moved off-line. The off-line control law is easier to implement reducing to a look-up table in comparison with the on-line approach. Finally, the explicit model predictive control performance has been compared with the linear controller obtained using H∞ approach. The results are illustrated by simulations. They show that the explicit MPC method has suitably improved the system performance, especially the quantity of control efforts is smaller and without saturation compared with that of H∞ control system.