International Journal of Control, Vol.86, No.8, 1338-1348, 2013
Scenario-based, closed-loop model predictive control with application to emergency vehicle scheduling
Model predictive control has been a major success story in process control. More recently, the methodology has been used in other contexts, including automotive engine control, power electronics and telecommunications. Most applications focus on set-point tracking and use single-sequence optimisation. Here we consider an alternative class of problems motivated by the scheduling of emergency vehicles. Here disturbances are the dominant feature. We develop a novel closed-loop model predictive control strategy aimed at this class of problems. We motivate, and illustrate, the ideas via the problem of fluid deployment of ambulance resources.
Keywords:scenario-based MPC;stochastic control;emergency vehicles;re-deployment;approximate dynamic programming