A System Level Approach to Tube-based Model Predictive Control

Abstract: Robust tube-based model predictive control (MPC) methods address constraint satisfaction by leveraging an a priori determined tube controller in the prediction to tighten the constraints. This paper presents a system level tube-MPC (SLTMPC) method derived from the system level parameterization (SLP), which allows optimization over the tube controller online when solving the MPC problem, which can significantly reduce conservativeness. We derive the SLTMPC method by establishing an equivalence relation between a class of robust MPC methods and the SLP. Finally, we show that the SLTMPC formulation naturally arises from an extended SLP formulation and show its merits in a numerical example.