Impulsive control systems with commutative vector fields

Abstract

We consider variational problems with control laws given by systems of ordinary differential equations whose vector fields depend linearly on the time derivativeu=(u 1,...,u m ) of the controlu=(u 1,...,u m ). The presence of the derivativeu, which is motivated by recent applications in Lagrangian mechanics, causes an impulsive dynamics: at any jump of the control, one expects a jump of the state. The main assumption of this paper is the commutativity of the vector fields that multiply theu α. This hypothesis allows us to associate our impulsive systems and the corresponding adjoint systems to suitable nonimpulsive control systems, to which standard techniques can be applied. In particular, we prove a maximum principle, which extends Pontryagin's maximum principle to impulsive commutative systems.