Efficient Implementation of Rate Constraints for Nonlinear Optimal Control
Provides a practical improvement for control engineers solving nonlinear optimal control problems with rate constraints.
The paper proposes a general method to implement rate constraints directly on the discretization mesh for collocation methods in nonlinear optimal control, achieving over 30% computational speedup while avoiding singular control arcs.
We propose a general approach to directly implement rate constraints on the discretization mesh for all collocation methods, for both state and input variables. Unlike conventional approaches that may lead to singular control arcs, the solution of this on-mesh implementation has better properties. Moreover, computational speedups of more than 30% can be achieved by exploiting the properties of the resulting linear constraint equations.