Model Predicitve Position Control of Electrical Drives on an Industrial PC

Dynamic position control of electric drives is of high importance in many industrial applications. In addition to the classic cascade control based on P and PI controllers for this task, advanced controls such as model predictive control (MPC) are receiving increasing attention. However, one drawback of MPC is the high computational power required, which makes it difficult to implement, especially for older servo drives. In this paper, we show how an industrial PC (IPC) that is available at many plants anyway can be used to implement MPC for position control of a simple drive system. Occurring dead times can be considered directly by the MPC.