arXiv AI By Perceval Beja-Battais (CB), Alain Grosset{\^e}te (CB), Nicolas Vayatis (CB)

Accelerating Nonlinear MPC by Behavior Cloning with Separated Timescales: Application to Nuclear Reactor Load-Following

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The paper introduces Structured Representation Learning for Behavior Cloning (SRLBC), an architecture that separates embeddings for slow, fast, and exogenous state variables in multiscale dynamical systems. Applied to a pressurized water reactor load‑following benchmark, SRLBC outperforms shared‑embedding baselines in cumulative cost, imitation accuracy, and constraint satisfaction, achieving near‑NMPC performance at 15× lower computational cost. When combined with a safety‑augmented approximate NMPC, the resulting controller is 6.8× faster than full NMPC while maintaining at least 99.8% feasibility, and it degrades least under distribution shift.

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