While NMPC applications have in the past been mostly used in the process and chemical industries with comparatively slow sampling rates, NMPC is more and more being applied to applications with high sampling rates, e . g ., in the automotive industry, or even when the states are distributed in space ( Distributed parameter systems ).
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However, it has since been extended to weakly nonlinear systems, time varying systems, distributed parameter systems, multi-input multi-output ( MIMO ) systems ( Horowitz, 1991 ), discrete systems ( these using the CAD tools has been an important, more recent development, which simplifies and automates much of the design procedure ( Borghesani et al ., 1994 ).