Insights into the explainability of Lasso-based DeePC for nonlinear systems

Data-enabled Predictive Control (DeePC) has recently gained the spotlight as an easy-to-use control technique that allows for constraint handling while relying on raw data only. Initially proposed for linear time-invariant systems, several DeePC extensions are now available to cope with nonlinear systems. Nonetheless, these solutions mainly focus on ensuring the controller’s effectiveness, overlooking the explainability of the final result. In this paper, we focus on analyzing the explainability of the outcome for the earliest and simplest DeePC approach, which utilizes Lasso regularization to cope with nonlinearities in the controlled system. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the decisions made by DeePC with Lasso regularization are unexplainable, as control actions are determined by data incoherent with the system’s local behavior. This result is true even when the available input/output samples are grouped according to the different operating conditions explored during data collection. Our numerical study confirms these findings, highlighting the benefits of data grouping in terms of performance while showing that explainability remains a challenge in control design via DeePC.