Predictive functional control with explicit pre-conditioning for oscillatory dynamic systems

Predictive functional control (PFC) is a popular industrial process control strategy, but its rather simplistic design renders it less effective in more demanding situations; for example, under-damping, open-loop instability or significant non-minimum phase characteristics have been difficult to control. Devising efficient strategies for such systems remains a topic of interest within the PFC community. This paper shows how a systematic pre-conditioning approach can improve PFC performance for under-damped systems. The proposed pre-conditioning stage is essentially an additional feedback loop whose sole purpose is to provide reliable predictions for PFC decision making. To prevent complicated performance tuning and constraints management procedures, compensator design is kept fairly simple and intuitive. Numerical studies verify the efficacy of the proposal.