Rapid prototyping of predictive controllers through an industrial platform

Model predictive control (MPC) has been shown to be an effective technique in order to improve the performance of a wide range of control applications characterized by fast dynamics. On the implementation side, rapid control prototyping plays a role of primary relevance in testing and iterating the chosen control strategy on a real-time system. In order to allow the rapid prototyping of MPC, this paper investigates its implementation on a National Instruments device, a widely used industrial platform that can be easily interfaced with the user through LabVIEW applications. Real experiments on a magnetic levitation system are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.