English

Internal Model Control design for systems learned by Control Affine Neural Nonlinear Autoregressive Exogenous Models

Systems and Control 2025-01-24 v2 Systems and Control

Abstract

This paper explores the use of Control Affine Neural Nonlinear AutoRegressive eXogenous (CA-NNARX) models for nonlinear system identification and model-based control design. The idea behind this architecture is to match the known control-affine structure of the system to achieve improved performance. Coherently with recent literature of neural networks for data-driven control, we first analyze the stability properties of CA-NNARX models, devising sufficient conditions for their incremental Input-to-State Stability (δ\deltaISS) that can be enforced at the model training stage. The model's stability property is then leveraged to design a stable Internal Model Control (IMC) architecture. The proposed control scheme is tested on a real Quadruple Tank benchmark system to address the output reference tracking problem. The results achieved show that (i) the modeling accuracy of CA-NNARX is superior to the one of a standard NNARX model for given weight size and training epochs, (ii) the proposed IMC law provides performance comparable to the ones of a standard Model Predictive Controller (MPC) at a significantly lower computational burden, and (iii) the δ\deltaISS of the model is beneficial to the closed-loop performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2402.05607,
  title  = {Internal Model Control design for systems learned by Control Affine Neural Nonlinear Autoregressive Exogenous Models},
  author = {Jing Xie and Fabio Bonassi and Riccardo Scattolini},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.05607},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:42:47.534Z