A control system for controlling an operation of a system with continuous-time nonlinear dynamics subject to constraints including equality and inequality constraints on state and control variables of the system, including an estimator to estimate a current state of the system using measurements of the operation of the system and a controller to iteratively solve, at each control time step, an approximation of a constrained nonlinear optimization problem to produce a control solution, wherein the approximation includes a linearization of the nonlinear dynamics of the system discretized by time intervals in the control horizon and represented using an approximation of the constraint Jacobian matrix for each time interval of the control horizon. The iterative solution procedure is based on a block-wise update formula for the approximation of the constraint Jacobian matrix and the intermediate condensing matrices using an evaluation of one or combination of the discretized dynamics of the system and at least one directional derivative of the discretized dynamics of the system. Each block in the constraint Jacobian matrix and in the intermediate condensing matrices represents one time interval in the prediction horizon and can be updated independently, based on a block-wise rank-one update formula without any iterative solution procedure and without any matrix-matrix multiplications or matrix factorizations.