This talk will be a repeat of the Presidential Address I gave to the Institute of Measurement and Control in November 2002.
Model Predictive Control (MPC) has been a great success in the petrochemical industry for the past 30 years, and is now increasingly applied in other process industries. This talk will argue that Predictive Control is in fact a new paradigm, which is competing with the traditional "PID" paradigm for feedback control. Furthermore, advances in computing technology now enable Predictive Control to be considered as a generic control technology for a wide range of applications, including fast servos and embedded systems. Potential applications to flight control will be considered, including fault-tolerant flight control. It will be shown that the Amsterdam disaster in 1992 might have been avoided with MPC technology.
The talk is aimed at a non-specialist audience and is hence an equation-free zone.
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