Explicit Computation of Indirect Hybrid MPC for Voltage Control in Multilevel DC-DC Converters

This paper extends indirect model predictive control (MPC) to the design of a three-level neutral point clamped (3L-NPC) step-down dc-dc converters. A hybrid model is used to map the switching pattern of two switches only and to build piecewise affine (PWA) decoupled models with reduced complexity. Two constrained optimization problems are explicitly solved offline to provide two explicit MPCs driven by a wake-up logic. The resulting approach represents a first step towards the extension of explicit MPC to more complex multilevel topologies, when a reduced computational effort is required.