Economic Nonlinear Model Predictive Control: Stability, Optimality and Performance

In recent years, Economic Model Predictive Control (EMPC) has received considerable attention of many research groups. The present tutorial survey summarizes state-of-the-art approaches in EMPC. In this context EMPC is to be understood as receding-horizon optimal control with a stage cost that does not simply penalize the distance to a desired equilibrium but encodes more sophisticated economic objectives. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of EMPC stability results: with and without terminal constraints, with and without dissipativtiy assumptions, with averaged constraints, formulations with multiple objectives and generalized terminal constraints as well as Lyapunov-based approaches. Moreover, we compare different performance criteria for some of the considered approaches and comment on the connections to recent research on dissipativity of optimal control problems. We consider a discrete-time setting and point towards continuous-time variants. We illustrate the different EMPC schemes with several examples.