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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Beyond just “flattening the curve”: Optimal control of epidemics with purely non-pharmaceutical interventions
    (Berlin ; Heidelberg : Springer, 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. © 2020, The Author(s).
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    Optimal control of multiphase steel production
    (Berlin ; Heidelberg : Springer, 2019) Hömberg, Dietmar; Krumbiegel, Klaus; Togobytska, Nataliya
    An optimal control problem for the production of multiphase steel is investigated that takes into account phase transformations in the steel slab. The state equations are a semilinear heat equation coupled with an ordinary differential equation, that describes the evolution of the steel microstructure. The time-dependent heat transfer coefficient serves as a control function. Necessary and sufficient optimality conditions for the control problem are derived. For the numerical solution of the control problem, a reduced sequential quadratic programming method with a primal-dual active set strategy is developed. The numerical results are presented for the optimal control of a cooling line in the production of hot-rolled Mo–Mn dual phase steel. © 2019, The Author(s).
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    Optimal Control Problems with Sparsity for Tumor Growth Models Involving Variational Inequalities
    (Dordrecht [u.a.] : Springer Science + Business Media, 2022) Colli, Pierluigi; Signori, Andrea; Sprekels, Jürgen
    This paper treats a distributed optimal control problem for a tumor growth model of Cahn–Hilliard type. The evolution of the tumor fraction is governed by a variational inequality corresponding to a double obstacle nonlinearity occurring in the associated potential. In addition, the control and state variables are nonlinearly coupled and, furthermore, the cost functional contains a nondifferentiable term like the L1-norm in order to include sparsity effects which is of utmost relevance, especially time sparsity, in the context of cancer therapies as applying a control to the system reflects in exposing the patient to an intensive medical treatment. To cope with the difficulties originating from the variational inequality in the state system, we employ the so-called deep quench approximation in which the convex part of the double obstacle potential is approximated by logarithmic functions. For such functions, first-order necessary conditions of optimality can be established by invoking recent results. We use these results to derive corresponding optimality conditions also for the double obstacle case, by deducing a variational inequality in terms of the associated adjoint state variables. The resulting variational inequality can be exploited to also obtain sparsity results for the optimal controls.
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    A distributed control problem for a fractional tumor growth model
    (Basel : MDPI, 2019) Colli, Pierluigi; Gilardi, Gianni; Sprekels, Jürgen
    In this paper, we study the distributed optimal control of a system of three evolutionary equations involving fractional powers of three self-adjoint, monotone, unbounded linear operators having compact resolvents. The system is a generalization of a Cahn-Hilliard type phase field system modeling tumor growth that has been proposed by Hawkins-Daarud, van der Zee and Oden. The aim of the control process, which could be realized by either administering a drug or monitoring the nutrition, is to keep the tumor cell fraction under control while avoiding possible harm for the patient. In contrast to previous studies, in which the occurring unbounded operators governing the diffusional regimes were all given by the Laplacian with zero Neumann boundary conditions, the operators may in our case be different; more generally, we consider systems with fractional powers of the type that were studied in a recent work by the present authors. In our analysis, we show the Fréchet differentiability of the associated control-to-state operator, establish the existence of solutions to the associated adjoint system, and derive the first-order necessary conditions of optimality for a cost functional of tracking type. © 2019 by the authors.
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    Optimization with learning-informed differential equation constraints and its applications
    (Les Ulis : EDP Sciences, 2022) Dong, Guozhi; Hintermüller, Michael; Papafitsoros, Kostas
    Inspired by applications in optimal control of semilinear elliptic partial differential equations and physics-integrated imaging, differential equation constrained optimization problems with constituents that are only accessible through data-driven techniques are studied. A particular focus is on the analysis and on numerical methods for problems with machine-learned components. For a rather general context, an error analysis is provided, and particular properties resulting from artificial neural network based approximations are addressed. Moreover, for each of the two inspiring applications analytical details are presented and numerical results are provided.
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    Second-order analysis of an optimal control problem in a phase field tumor growth model with singular potentials and chemotaxis
    (Les Ulis : EDP Sciences, 2021) Colli, Pierluigi; Signori, Andrea; Sprekels, Jürgen
    This paper concerns a distributed optimal control problem for a tumor growth model of Cahn–Hilliard type including chemotaxis with possibly singular potentials, where the control and state variables are nonlinearly coupled. First, we discuss the weak well-posedness of the system under very general assumptions for the potentials, which may be singular and nonsmooth. Then, we establish the strong well-posedness of the system in a reduced setting, which however admits the logarithmic potential: this analysis will lay the foundation for the study of the corresponding optimal control problem. Concerning the optimization problem, we address the existence of minimizers and establish both first-order necessary and second-order sufficient conditions for optimality. The mathematically challenging second-order analysis is completely performed here, after showing that the solution mapping is twice continuously differentiable between suitable Banach spaces via the implicit function theorem. Then, we completely identify the second-order Fréchet derivative of the control-to-state operator and carry out a thorough and detailed investigation about the related properties.