2013, Bleck, Wolfgang, Hömberg, Dietmar, Prahl, Ulrich, Suwanpinij, Piyada, Togobytska, Nataliya

In this article, the optimal control of a cooling line for production of dual phase steel in a hot rolling process is discussed. In order to achieve a desired dual phase steel microstructure an optimal cooling strategy has to be found. The cooling strategy should be such that a desired final distribution of ferrite in the steel slab is reached most accurately. This problem has been solved by means of mathematical control theory. The results of the optimal control of the cooling line have been verified in hot rolling experiments at the pilot hot rolling mill at the Institute for Metal Forming (IMF), TU Bergakademie Freiberg.

2019, Gräßle, Carmen, Hintermüller, Michael, Hinze, Michael, Keil, Tobias

We are concerned with the simulation and control of a two phase flow model governed by a coupled Cahn--Hilliard Navier--Stokes system involving a nonsmooth energy potential.We establish the existence of optimal solutions and present two distinct approaches to derive suitable stationarity conditions for the bilevel problem, namely C- and strong stationarity. Moreover, we demonstrate the numerical realization of these concepts at the hands of two adaptive solution algorithms relying on a specifically developed goal-oriented error estimator.In addition, we present a model order reduction approach using proper orthogonal decomposition (POD-MOR) in order to replace high-fidelity models by low order surrogates. In particular, we combine POD with space-adapted snapshots and address the challenges which are the consideration of snapshots with different spatial resolutions and the conservation of a solenoidal property.

2021, Henrion, René, Jourani, Abderrahim, Mordukhovich, Boris S.

This paper is mainly devoted to the study of controlled sweeping processes with polyhedral moving sets in Hilbert spaces. Based on a detailed analysis of truncated Hausdorff distances between moving polyhedra, we derive new existence and uniqueness theorems for sweeping trajectories corresponding to various classes of control functions acting in moving sets. Then we establish quantitative stability results, which provide efficient estimates on the sweeping trajectory dependence on controls and initial values. Our final topic, accomplished in finite-dimensional state spaces, is deriving new necessary optimality and suboptimality conditions for sweeping control systems with endpoint constrains by using constructive discrete approximations.

2020, Kantner, Markus, Koprucki, Thomas

When effective medical treatment and vaccination are not available, non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing, home quarantine and far-reaching shutdown of public life are the only available strategies to prevent the spread of epidemics. Based on an extended SEIR (susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered) model and continuous-time optimal control theory, we compute the optimal non-pharmaceutical intervention strategy for the case that a vaccine is never found and complete containment (eradication of the epidemic) is impossible. In this case, the optimal control must meet competing requirements: First, the minimization of disease-related deaths, and, second, the establishment of a sufficient degree of natural immunity at the end of the measures, in order to exclude a second wave. Moreover, the socio-economic costs of the intervention shall be kept at a minimum. The numerically computed optimal control strategy is a single-intervention scenario that goes beyond heuristically motivated interventions and simple "flattening of the curve". Careful analysis of the computed control strategy reveals, however, that the obtained solution is in fact a tightrope walk close to the stability boundary of the system, where socio-economic costs and the risk of a new outbreak must be constantly balanced against one another. The model system is calibrated to reproduce the initial exponential growth phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany.

2015, Farshbaf Shaker, Mohammad Hassan, Heinemann, Christian

In this work we investigate a phase field model for damage processes in two-dimensional viscoelastic media with nonhomogeneous Neumann data describing external boundary forces. In the first part we establish global-in-time existence, uniqueness, a priori estimates and continuous dependence of strong solutions on the data. The main difficulty is caused by the irreversibility as well as boundedness of the phase field variable which results in a doubly constrained PDE system. In the last part we consider an optimal control problem where a cost functional penalizes maximal deviations from prescribed damage profiles. The goal is to minimize the cost functional with respect to exterior forces acting on the boundary which play the role of the control variable in the considered model . To this end, we prove existence of minimizers and study a family of "local'' approximations via adapted cost functionals.

2019, Alphonse, Amal, Hintermüller, Michael, Rautenberg, Carlos N.

For a class of quasivariational inequalities (QVIs) of obstacle-type the stability of its solution set and associated optimal control problems are considered. These optimal control problems are non-standard in the sense that they involve an objective with set-valued arguments. The approach to study the solution stability is based on perturbations of minimal and maximal elements to the solution set of the QVI with respect to monotonic perturbations of the forcing term. It is shown that different assumptions are required for studying decreasing and increasing perturbations and that the optimization problem of interest is well-posed.

2011, Colombo, Giovanni, Henrion, René, Hoang, Nguyen D., Mordukhovich, Borils S.

We formulate and study an optimal control problem for the sweeping (Moreau) process, where control functions enter the moving sweeping set. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study in the literature devoted to optimal control of the sweeping process. We first establish an existence theorem of optimal solutions and then derive necessary optimality conditions for this optimal control problem of a new type, where the dynamics is governed by discontinuous differential inclusions with variable right-hand sides. Our approach to necessary optimality conditions is based on the method of discrete approximations and advanced tools of variational analysis and generalized differentiation. The final results obtained are given in terms of the initial data of the controlled sweeping process and are illustrated by nontrivial examples.

2011, Hömberg, Dietmar, Liu, Jujun, Togobytska, Nataliya

We consider an inverse problem arising in laser-induced thermotherapy, a minimally invasive method for cancer treatment, in which cancer tissues is destroyed by coagulation. For the dosage planning numerical simulation play an important role. To this end a crucial problem is to identify the thermal growth kinetics of the coagulated zone. Mathematically, this problem is a nonlinear and nonlocal parabolic heat source inverse problem. The solution to this inverse problem is defined as the minimizer of a nonconvex cost functional. The existence of the minimizer is proven. We derive the Gateaux derivative of the cost functional, which is based on the adjoint system, and use it for a numerical approximation of the optimal coefficient.

2020, Alphonse, Amal, Hintermüller, Michael, Rautenberg, Carlos N.

We focus on elliptic quasi-variational inequalities (QVIs) of obstacle type and prove a number of results on the existence of solutions, directional differentiability and optimal control of such QVIs. We give three existence theorems based on an order approach, an iteration scheme and a sequential regularisation through partial differential equations. We show that the solution map taking the source term into the set of solutions of the QVI is directionally differentiable for general unsigned data, thereby extending the results of our previous work which provided a first differentiability result for QVIs in infinite dimensions. Optimal control problems with QVI constraints are also considered and we derive various forms of stationarity conditions for control problems, thus supplying among the first such results in this area.

2009, Hömberg, Dietmar, Steinbrecher, Andreas, Stykel, Tatjana

In this article we will consider the optimal control of robot guided laser material treatments, where the discrete multibody system model of a robot is coupled with a PDE model of the laser treatment. We will present and discuss several optimization approaches of such optimal control problems and its properties in view of a robust and suitable numerical solution. We will illustrate the approaches in an application to the surface hardening of steel.