Real-Time Energy-Efficient Actuation of Induction Motor Drives Using Approximate Dynamic Programming

This article proposes a real-time control strategy for induction motor drives, harmonizing accurate torque and flux tracking with energy efficiency. Common problems related to lengthy control horizons and the associated computational burden are dealt with by introducing a value function approximation in the model-predictive structure to quantify the impact of instantaneous decisions on future states. An augmented model of the drive is introduced to determine this value function approximation offline. The resulting optimization problem is implemented in a real-time environment and its effectiveness is established on an experimental setup for both steady-state and dynamic load conditions. Experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms default model-based methods by up to 89.7%, thus making it a promising real-time optimal control strategy in the domain of electric drives.