Towards the Development of a CAD Tool for the Implementation of High-Speed Embedded MPCs on FPGAs

Designing embedded model predictive controllers (MPCs) for systems with fast sampling rates is a tedious and multidisciplinary process. The reason is that from the high-level description of the control problem to the final implementation on a computational platform, the MPC design space covers multiple abstraction levels in which critical design decisions have to be made. Therefore, currently, the identification of the best design criteria can not be automated. Instead, in this paper we take an step towards the development of a computer-aided design (CAD) tool that enables the semi-automatic implementation of application-specific embedded MPCs on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for its application to control-engineering problems with fast sampling rates.