INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ROBUST AND NONLINEAR CONTROL Int. J. Robust Nonlinear Control 2004; 14:415–433 (DOI: 10.1002/rnc.890) Predictive control of thermal Power Plants C. Aurora 1 , L. Magni 1,n,y , R. Scattolini 1 , P. Colombo 2 , F. Pretolani 2 and G. Villa 2 1 Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Universit " a di Pavia, via Ferrata 1, 27100 Pavia, Italy 2 CESI, via Rubattino, 54, 20134 Milano, Italy SUMMARY This work presents the results of a project aimed at verifying the applicability of industrial model predictive control (MPC) to thermal Power Plants. The research is motivated by the need to improve the efficiency of power plants so as to cope with the high levels of competition induced by the deregulation of the energy market. A detailed plant simulator, already used for operators training and controllers tuning, is coupled to an industrial software package implementing the dynamic matrix control algorithm. The achieved results witness the great potentialities of MPC, with respect to classical decentralized schemes, in terms of economical savings, reduction of pollutants, improved flexibility, easier tuning and better documentation. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KEY WORDS: model predictive control; thermal Power Plants 1. INTRODUCTION The deregulation of the energy market in western Europe has dramatically increased the competition among the energy producers. This calls for higher and higher levels of efficiency in the management of the operating units in order to fulfill a number of requirements. Among them, the most important are: (i) the optimization of the steady state operating conditions according to precisely quantified economic criteria, (ii) the possibility to operate with flexibility over the whole operating range with high rates of load variations, (iii) efficient dynamic control strategies explicitly coping with the constraints imposed by technological limits and by environmental restrictions, (iv) systematic procedures for the design and documentation of the control system. Due to its almost unique features, which fully comply with all these requirements, model predictive control (MPC), see e.g. the survey papers [1,2] and the books [3,4], has extensively been used during the past twenty years mostly in the chemical and the petrochemical industry, where nowadays it is unanimously considered as the proper approach to the control design, see Reference [5]. In spite of the many similarities between the problems of managing and controlling (petro)-chemical units and power generation plants, the application of MPC in the Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. y E-mail: lalo.magni@unipv.it n Correspondence to: Professor Lalo Magni, Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Universit " a di Pavia, via Ferrata 1, 27100 Pavia, Italy