Adaptive Reference Governor for DC–DC Converters Based on Model Predictive Control

In this article, we propose a time-varying model predictive control (MPC)-based scheme to enhance the dynamic performance of dc–dc converters. The proposed approach employs MPC as a reference governor (RG), addressing industrial certification constraints that may limit modifications to the low-level controller. To accommodate the computational limitations of conventional control boards, we introduce a highly efficient real-time optimization algorithm for solving equality-constrained quadratic programming (QP) problems. The algorithm is based on a tailored QR factorization that outperforms well-known linear algebra libraries, and it is shown to be superior to condensing with state elimination. Furthermore, we implement an efficient recursive least-squares (RLS) method to provide a linear-time varying model for the adaptive MPC-based RG. No information regarding the topology of the converter nor the structure of the low-level controller is required for such adaptation, making the proposed method self-tuning and eliminating the need for prior identification steps. The proposed control scheme has been tested on various simulated and real dc–dc converters, demonstrating its computational and memory efficiency, as well as its versatility across different converter topologies.