David Quinn Mayne (23 April 1930 – 27 May 2024) was a South African-born British academic, engineer, teacher and author.
At the end of 1956 he returned to his academic post at the University of Witwatersrand to develop a new course in automatic control and gaining a MSc.(Eng).
[1] Among his many breakthroughs, arguably his most important contribution was his development of a rigorous mathematical method for analysing Model predictive control algorithms (MPC).
MPC's major strength is its capacity to deal with nonlinearities and hard constraints in a simple and intuitive fashion.
His work underpins a class of algorithms that are provably correct, heuristically explainable, and yield control system designs which meet practically important objectives.
This opened the door to substantial developments and is recognised as a pivotal contribution and precursor of the so-called particle filtering.
The exact penalty method overcomes the widely referenced Maratos effect, identified by one of Mayne’s Ph.D. students.