Stabilizing model predictive control: On the enlargement of the terminal set

It is well known that a large terminal set leads to a large region where the model predictive control problem is feasible without the need for a long prediction horizon. This paper proposes a new method for the enlargement of the terminal set. Different from existing approaches, the method uses the convex hull of trajectories as the basis for the construction. These trajectories may be any feasible trajectories of the system terminating in an invariant set that contains the origin and are not restricted to consist of equilibrium points only. The resulting terminal controller is the solution of an optimization problem depending on the state and is therefore in general a nonlinear function. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.