Distributed Model Predictive Control of Time-Delay Systems: Application to a Series of Chemical Reactors

In this paper, an approach to distributed model predictive control (MPC) of linear interconnected time-delay systems is proposed. The particular case of distributed control of a series of chemical reactors is considered. The distributed MPC design includes representation of the interconnected time-delay dynamics in the augmented state space and finding a suboptimal solution of the Quadratic Programming problem resulting from the centralized MPC formulation. The proposed approach would be appropriate for embedded distributed MPC of time-delay systems and is illustrated on a simulation example of series of two chemical reactors with recycles.