Suboptimal nonlinear model predictive control with input move-blocking

This paper deals with the integration of input move-blocking into the framework of suboptimal model predictive control. The blocked input parameterisation is explicitly considered as a source of suboptimality. A straightforward integration approach is to hold back a manually generated stabilising fallback solution in some buffer for the case that the optimiser does not find a better input move-blocked solution. An extended approach superimposes the manually generated stabilising warm-start by the move-blocked control sequence and enables a stepwise improvement of the control performance. In addition, this contribution provides a detailed review of the literature on input move-blocked model predictive control and combines important results with the findings of suboptimal model predictive control. A numerical example supports the theoretical results and shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach.