The barriers between systems engineering and medicine are slowly eroding as recently it has become evident that medicine has a lot to gain by systems technology. In particular, the drug administration problem be cast as a control engineering problem, where the objective is to keep the drug concentration at certain organs in the body close to desired set-points. A number of constraints render the problem rather challenging. For example, hard constraints may be posed on the drug concentration in blood, because a higher than a certain limit concentration may render the drug effects adverse and toxic. In this paper we show that a popular method for tackling chemical engineering control problems can be used for determining the optimal drug administration. Specifically, the Model Predictive Control (MPC) technology is used for taking optimal decisions regarding of drug concentration in the human body, while incorporating constraints on both drug concentration and drug infusion rate.
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