A multicontroller structure for teaching and designing predictive control strategies

The paper deals with the unification of the existing linear control algorithms in order to facilitate their transfer to the engineering students and to industry's engineers. The resulting control algorithm is the Global Predictive Control (GlobPC), which is now taught at the graduate and continuing education levels. GlobPC is based on an internal model framework where three independent control criteria are minimized: one for tracking, one for regulation and one for feedforward. This structure allows to obtain desired tracking, regulation and feedforward behaviors in an optimal way while keeping them perfectly separated. It also cleanly separates the deterministic and stochastic predictions of the process model output. (author)