A new approach for the nonlinear fractional optimal control problems with external persistent disturbances

The aim of this manuscript is to investigate an efficient iterative approach for the nonlinear fractional optimal control problems affected by the external persistent disturbances. For this purpose, first the internal model principle is employed to transform the fractional dynamic system with disturbance into an undisturbed system with both integer- and fractional-order derivatives. The necessary optimality conditions are then reduced into a sequence of linear algebraic equations by using a series expansion approach and the Grünwald–Letnikov approximation for the fractional derivatives. The convergence of the latter sequence to the optimal solution is also studied. In addition, an iterative algorithm designing the suboptimal control law is presented. Numerical simulations confirm that the new approach is efficient to reject the external disturbance and provides satisfactory results compared to the other existing methods.