It has been seen considerable interest in development of model predictive control (MPC) in last decades. Descpite widely received success of MPC in engineering, MPC is still mainly applied in process industry and effort has been made to extend the application areas of MPC. This presentation reports the attempt in applying MPC in aerospace and space sector, in particular on air traffic management and magnetic attitude control of satellite. It will be shown that since air traffic management is operated in a dynamic and uncertain environment, MPC or, receding horizon control, provides a promising approach for real-time planning and scheduling. Three problems are investigated using MPC, i.e. airport capacity management, aircraft sequencing and scheduling, and free flight path planning. For the space applications, magnetic attitude control for low-Earth-orbit satellites is considered where lack of controllability along the local magnetic field and the change of local magnetic field due to the different location on the orbit are addressed using MPC approach. The developed control strategy is implemented on the GOCE satellite simulator provided by European Space Agency with promising performance.
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