  The problem of achieving a good trade-off in Stochastic Model Predictive
Control between the competing goals of improving the average performance and
reducing conservativeness, while still guaranteeing recursive feasibility and
low computational complexity, is addressed. We propose a novel, less
restrictive scheme which is based on considering stability and recursive
feasibility separately. Through an explicit first step constraint we guarantee
recursive feasibility. In particular we guarantee the existence of a feasible
input trajectory at each time instant, but we only require that the input
sequence computed at time $k$ remains feasible at time $k+1$ for most
disturbances but not necessarily for all, which suffices for stability. To
overcome the computational complexity of probabilistic constraints, we propose
an offline constraint-tightening procedure, which can be efficiently solved via
a sampling approach to the desired accuracy. The online computational
complexity of the resulting Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithm is similar
to that of a nominal MPC with terminal region. A numerical example, which
provides a comparison with classical, recursively feasible Stochastic MPC and
Robust MPC, shows the efficacy of the proposed approach.
