2022, Hintermüller, Michael, Keil, Tobias

This paper is concerned with the distributed optimal control of a time-discrete Cahn-Hilliard-Navier-Stokes system with variable densities. It focuses on the double-obstacle potential which yields an optimal control problem for a variational inequality of fourth order and the Navier-Stokes equation. The existence of solutions to the primal system and of optimal controls is established. The Lipschitz continuity of the constraint mapping is derived and used to characterize the directional derivative of the constraint mapping via a system of variational inequalities and partial differential equations. Finally, strong stationarity conditions are presented following an approach from Mignot and Puel.

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.

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.

2020, Colli, Pierluigi, Gilardi, Gianni, Sprekels, Jürgen

In their recent work ``Well-posedness, regularity and asymptotic analyses for a fractional phase field system'' (Asymptot. Anal. 114 (2019), 93--128), two of the present authors have studied phase field systems of Caginalp type, which model nonconserved, nonisothermal phase transitions and in which the occurring diffusional operators are given by fractional versions in the spectral sense of unbounded, monotone, selfadjoint, linear operators having compact resolvents. In this paper, we complement this analysis by investigating distributed optimal control problems for such systems. It is shown that the associated control-to-state operator is Fréchet differentiable between suitable Banach spaces, and meaningful first-order necessary optimality conditions are derived in terms of a variational inequality and the associated adjoint state variables.

2016, Farshbaf-Shaker, M. Hassan, Heinemann, Christian

Controlling the growth of material damage is an important engineering task with plenty of real world applications. In this paper we approach this topic from the mathematical point of view by investigating an optimal boundary control problem for a damage phase-field model for viscoelastic media. We consider non-homogeneous Neumann data for the displacement field which describe external boundary forces and act as control variable. The underlying hyberbolic-parabolic PDE system for the state variables exhibit highly nonlinear terms which emerge in context with damage processes. The cost functional is of tracking type, and constraints for the control variable are prescribed. Based on recent results from [4], where global-in-time well-posedness of strong solutions to the lower level problem and existence of optimal controls of the upper level problem have been established, we show in this contribution differentiability of the control-to-state mapping, wellposedness of the linearization and existence of solutions of the adjoint state system. Due to the highly nonlinear nature of the state system which has by our knowledge not been considered for optimal control problems in the literature, we present a very weak formulation and estimation techniques of the associated adjoint system. For mathematical reasons the analysis is restricted here to the two-dimensional case. We conclude our results with first-order necessary optimality conditions in terms of a variational inequality together with PDEs for the state and adjoint state system.

2018, Colli, Pierluigi, Gilardi, Gianni, Sprekels, Jürgen

In the recent paper Well-posedness and regularity for a generalized fractional CahnHilliard system, the same authors derived general well-posedness and regularity results for a rather general system of evolutionary operator equations having the structure of a CahnHilliard system. The operators appearing in the system equations were fractional versions in the spectral sense of general linear operators A and B having compact resolvents and are densely defined, unbounded, selfadjoint, and monotone in a Hilbert space of functions defined in a smooth domain. The associated double-well potentials driving the phase separation process modeled by the CahnHilliard system could be of a very general type that includes standard physically meaningful cases such as polynomial, logarithmic, and double obstacle nonlinearities. In the subsequent paper Optimal distributed control of a generalized fractional CahnHilliard system (Appl. Math. Optim. (2018), https://doi.org/10.1007/s00245-018-9540-7) by the same authors, an analysis of distributed optimal control problems was performed for such evolutionary systems, where only the differentiable case of certain polynomial and logarithmic double-well potentials could be admitted. Results concerning existence of optimizers and first-order necessary optimality conditions were derived, where more restrictive conditions on the operators A and B had to be assumed in order to be able to show differentiability properties for the associated control-to-state operator. In the present paper, we complement these results by studying a distributed control problem for such evolutionary systems in the case of nondifferentiable nonlinearities of double obstacle type. For such nonlinearities, it is well known that the standard constraint qualifications cannot be applied to construct appropriate Lagrange multipliers. To overcome this difficulty, we follow here the so-called deep quench method. This technique, in which the nondifferentiable double obstacle nonlinearity is approximated by differentiable logarithmic nonlinearities, was first developed by P. Colli, M.H. Farshbaf-Shaker and J. Sprekels in the paper A deep quench approach to the optimal control of an AllenCahn equation with dynamic boundary conditions and double obstacles (Appl. Math. Optim. 71 (2015), pp. 1-24) and has proved to be a powerful tool in a number of optimal control problems with double obstacle potentials in the framework of systems of CahnHilliard type. We first give a general convergence analysis of the deep quench approximation that includes an error estimate and then demonstrate that its use leads in the double obstacle case to appropriate first-order necessary optimality conditions in terms of a variational inequality and the associated adjoint state system.

2015, Peschka, Dirk, Rotundo, Nella, Thomas, Marita

We discuss analytical and numerical methods for the optimization of optoelectronic devices by performing optimal control of the PDE governing the carrier transport with respect to the doping profile. First, we provide a cost functional that is a sum of a regularization and a contribution, which is motivated by the modal net gain that appears in optoelectronic models of bulk or quantum-well lasers. Then, we state a numerical discretization, for which we study optimized solutions for different regularizations and for vanishing weights.

2012, Krumbiegel, Klaus, Rehberg, Joachim

In this paper we study optimal control problems governed by semilinear parabolic equations where the spatial dimension is two or three. Moreover, we consider pointwise constraints on the control and on the state. We formulate first order necessary and second order sufficient optimality conditions. We make use of recent results regarding elliptic regularity and apply the concept of maximal parabolic regularity to the occurring partial differential equations.

2015, Colli, Pierluigi, Gilardi, Gianni, Sprekels, Jürgen

A boundary control problem for the pure Cahn-Hilliard equations with possibly singular potentials and dynamic boundary conditions is studied and first-order necessary conditions for optimality are proved.

2012, Dreyer, Wolfgang, Druet, Pierre-Étienne, Klein, Olaf, Sprekels, Jürgen

This paper deals with the mathematical modeling and simulation of crystal growth processes by the so-called Czochralski method and related methods, which are important industrial processes to grow large bulk single crystals of semiconductor materials such as, e.,g., gallium arsenide (GaAs) or silicon (Si) from the melt. In particular, we investigate a recently developed technology in which traveling magnetic fields are applied in order to control the behavior of the turbulent melt flow. Since numerous different physical effects like electromagnetic fields, turbulent melt flows, high temperatures, heat transfer via radiation, etc., play an important role in the process, the corresponding mathematical model leads to an extremely difficult system of initial-boundary value problems for nonlinearly coupled partial differential equations ...