ON THE CONTROLLABILITY OF A COUPLED SYSTEM OF TWO KORTEWEG–DE VRIES EQUATIONS

Abstract

This paper proves the local exact boundary controllability property of a nonlinear system of two coupled Korteweg–de Vries equations which models the interactions of weakly nonlinear gravity waves (see [10]). Following the method in [24], which combines the analysis of the linearized system and the Banach's fixed point theorem, the controllability problem is reduced to prove a nonstandard unique continuation property of the eigenfunctions of the corresponding differential operator.