Initial condition of costate in linear optimal control using convex analysis

Abstract

The Pontryagin Maximum Principle is one of the most important results in optimal control, and provides necessary conditions for optimality in the form of a mixed initial/terminal boundary condition on a pair of differential equations for the system state and its conjugate costate. Unfortunately, this mixed boundary value problem is usually difficult to solve, since the Pontryagin Maximum Principle does not give any information on the initial value of the costate. In this paper, we explore an optimal control problem with linear and convex structure and derive the associated dual optimization problem using convex duality, which is often much easier to solve than the original optimal control problem. We present that the solution to the dual optimization problem supplements the necessary conditions of the Pontryagin Maximum Principle, and elaborate the procedure of constructing the optimal control and its corresponding state trajectory in terms of the solution to the dual problem.