Auto-coding implementation of Model Predictive Control with application to flight control

This paper describes an implementation of Model Predictive Control (MPC) in Simulink, using only built-in blocks. This enables the use of Matlab´s Real-Time Workshop automatically to generate implementation code for an embedded processor. Experimental results are presented using MPC for control of an aircraft model in a wind tunnel. The blocks-only implementation is achieved by expressing an interior-point optimisation as a sequence of operations on a stored solution. A limitation of existing MPC implementations is that the on-line optimisation demands a complex, sometimes nondeterministic algorithm, making it impossible to verify the resulting software for safety critical applications such as flight control. The approach introduced in this paper permits automatic code generation and a route to verifiable MPC software.