In order to obtain a wider speed range for the permanent-magnet linear motor drive system, a half-centralized open-end winding topology is studied. In this topology, N movers are supplied by N+1 voltage-source inverters (VSIs), and all these VSIs share a common dc bus voltage. In order to reduce the computation burden, in this article, a simplified phase model predictive voltage control (S-PMPVC) is proposed. For S-PMPVC, the optimal and suboptimal base levels are defined. When the optimal base level cannot be implemented, the suboptimal base level is selected. As a result, S-PMPVC requires smaller computation burden while the performances are not degraded. By taking the advantage of the smaller computation burden, S-PMPVC can adopt higher control frequency to improve performances. The effectiveness of S-PMPVC has been verified by simulation and experimental results.