Design and Implementation of a Predictive Control strategy based on an Industrial Controller

This paper describes the design and implementation of a model-based predictive control strategy based on a commercial, high performance industrial controller, which hardware includes a FPGA device. The implemented algorithm is the result of a combination of conventional processor software and FPGA embedded software in a distributed fashion, to achieve lower computational time compared with conventional processor software only approach. The high computational load required by the predictive control strategy is performed into the FPGA, which acts as an accelerator of the conventional processor. All software is developed using a high-level graphics language, yielding a significant reduction on implementation times. The paper includes a numerical example which verifies the controller performance.