Oracle-Based Economic Predictive Control

This paper deals with an economic predictive controller for the optimal operation of a plant under the assumption that the only measurement of the system is the economic cost function to be minimized. In order to predict the evolution of the economic cost for a given input trajectory, an oracle with a NARX structure is proposed. Sufficient conditions to ensure the existence of such oracle are given, and based on this oracle, a novel predictive controller is proposed. Under certain assumptions, including ideal accurate estimation, it is proven that the proposed oracle-based economic predictive controller provides the same solution of a standard economic MPC based on the model plant, inheriting the properties of this class of controllers. The proposed oracle-based economic predictive controller is applied to a quadruple-tank process example.