  Tight performance specifications in combination with operational constraints
make model predictive control (MPC) the method of choice in various industries.
As the performance of an MPC controller depends on a sufficiently accurate
objective and prediction model of the process, a significant effort in the MPC
design procedure is dedicated to modeling and identification. Driven by the
increasing amount of available system data and advances in the field of machine
learning, data-driven MPC techniques have been developed to facilitate the MPC
controller design. While these methods are able to leverage available data,
they typically do not provide principled mechanisms to automatically trade off
exploitation of available data and exploration to improve and update the
objective and prediction model. To this end, we present a learning-based MPC
formulation using posterior sampling techniques, which provides finite-time
regret bounds on the learning performance while being simple to implement using
off-the-shelf MPC software and algorithms. The performance analysis of the
method is based on posterior sampling theory and its practical efficiency is
illustrated using a numerical example of a highly nonlinear dynamical
car-trailer system.
