When FPGAs Meet Regionless Explicit MPC: An Implementation of Long-horizon Linear MPC for Power Electronic Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a novel real-time implementation of linear model predictive control (MPC) schemes based on region-less explicit MPC (RL-EMPC). RL-EMPC is a recently proposed explicit MPC solution for achieving a low memory footprint compared to other explicit MPC methods. Thus RL-EMPC can effectively handle systems with high sampling rates even for large-size MPC problems, i.e. systems with many states and/or constraints. An architecture for an implementation on an FPGA device is presented and validated with two application examples (buck-boost converter, modular multilevel converter). Simulation results on FPGA hardware-level demonstrate that long-horizon linear MPC can be implemented on low-cost FPGAs with the proposed architecture for various power electronic systems.