Evaluation of Piecewise Affine Control via Binary Search Tree.pdfVIP

Evaluation of Piecewise Affine Control via Binary Search Tree P. Tøndel T. A. Johansen A. Bemporad
Department of Engineering Cybernetics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway.
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, University of Siena, 53100 Siena, Italy. Abstract We present an algorithm for generating a binary search tree that allows efficient evaluation of piecewise affine (PWA) functions defined on a polyhedral partitioning. This is useful for PWA control approaches, such as explicit model predictive control (MPC), as it allows the controller to be implemented online with small computational effort. The computation time is logarithmic in the number of regions in the PWA function. 1 Introduction Piecewise Affine (PWA) controllers arise naturally in various applications, e.g in the presence of constraints. The simplicity of PWA systems also make them attrac- tive as an approximation to non-linear systems. In this paper we address evaluation of a PWA function. This may seem trivial, but when the function is complex, a straightforward implementation is computationally expensive. The main motiva- tion behind this work, is recent developments within explicit solutions of Model Predictive Control (MPC), in which the solutions are complex PWA state feedback laws. In (Bemporad et al., 2002) it was recognized that the linear MPC problem can be formulated as a multi-parametric quadratic program (mp-QP) and solved explicitly, with a PWA solution. An algorithm to solve the mp-QP is also provided, however, a more efficient algorithm is developed in (Tøndel et al., 2001). An alter- native solution strategy is given in (Johansen et al., 2000), where pre-determination of a small set of sampling instants where the active set is allowed to change gives a suboptimal solution. Sub-optimality of mp-QP is also i