Index of /puublications_others/Cutler-DMC-history-1969-to-1973

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[TXT]README.html2025-10-11 15:38 2.7K 
[ ]2025_Morari-interview-Model_Predictive_Control_The_Genesis_of_an_Idea_Histories_of_Control.pdf2025-10-11 14:10 465K 
[ ]1979_Cutler Ramaker-AIChE-meeting.pdf2025-10-11 13:06 8.7M 
[ ]1982-1979-US-patent-DMC.pdf2025-09-17 23:06 1.7M 
[ ]1983_Cutler_PhDthesis.pdf2025-09-17 22:24 16M 
[ ]1975-DMC-draft-paper.pdf2025-08-25 09:52 5.7M 
[ ]Comments-from-Sigurd-Skogestad-2025.docx2025-08-24 15:13 14K 
[ ]1969-cutler-phd-proposal-clean.pdf2025-08-24 14:57 534K 
[ ]1969-cutler-phd-proposal-clean.docx2025-08-24 14:56 1.0M 
[ ]1969-cutler- phd-proposal-original.pdf2025-08-18 11:45 2.2M 
[TXT]email-from-Cutler-to-Morari-2010.txt2024-05-19 20:01 4.9K 
[ ]email-from-Cutler-to-Morari-2010-attachment-CRC Shell 1970 papers 43 sheets.pdf2024-05-19 19:58 2.0M 
[ ]1980_Cutler-Ramaker_Dynamic-matrix-control_JACC1980.pdf2018-11-01 13:58 387K 
Original work on DMC by Charlie Cutler.

To: PSE colleagues with interest in science history

From: Sigurd Skogestad, NTNU (October 2025)

As you probably know, Model Predictive Control (MPC) originated within the process control community and is at present the favored multivariable control approach worldwide. The effectiveness of MPC was confirmed industrially at Shell refineries during the 1970s and a conference paper on DMC Cutler and Ramaker from Shell was presented at an National AIChe meeting in Houston in April 1979 (but only distibuted to people who attended the talk) - and again at the JACC meeting in San Francisco in August 1980 (and this time the essentially identical paper also appears in the printed preceedings).

However, the main idea behind MPC, which is to formulate the control problem as a moving horizon open-loop optimization problem and to solve it online using a computer, goes back to Charlie Cutler’s PhD proposal from 1969.

Of course, other people had similar ideas at the time; in particular, Jaques Richalet in France. Richalet publsihed a paper on “model predictive heuristic control” is Automatica in 1978 (Richalet told me in 2007 that the paper was under review for three years and that the word “heuristic” was added to satisfy the reviewers). Probably more importantly, Richalet developed a MPC software package (IDCOM) in 1973 and the first industrial applications of IDCOM are from the 1970s. It is unlikely that Richalet and Cutler were aware of the other’s work before 1979. Both the IDCOM and DMC softwares had a large industrial impact in the 1980s and 1990s, and are still in industrial use. In this respect, it is interesting to note that the DMC and IDCOM softwares were in some sense joined when Aspen in 1996 aquired the two main competing MPC companiies, namely Setpoint (IDCOM) and DMC.

On this web page you can find most of the early material from Cutler.

We have also published some of the material on this web page in a book by Skogestad and Adams (2025). The reason for publishing this book is a recent interview with Manfred Morari in the IEEE control Systems Magazine (2025). Here, Manfred refers to the PhD proposal of Cutler from 1969 as the origin of MPC, but the only reference source was my (Sigurd Skogestad’s) personal webpage, where I have a copy of some material that Cutler had emailed to Morari in 2010. Personal webpages may not survive so Tom Adams (who is also here at NTNU) suggested to publish it as a book so that it would available for the future.

You can aceess the book freely here: PSE Press Bookstore – PSE Community.org Or here: https://doi.org/10.69997/pse.105161