Relaxation methods for optimal switching control of PDE-dynamical systems

Abstract

The chapter reviews certain computational approaches to solve optimal control problems for evolution-type partial differential equations, where some control functions are limited to switching. The mechanism that enforces switching is modeled as integer restrictions. This brings a combinatorial aspect into the apart from switching already computationally very demanding optimization problems. Recently, great advances have been made to tackle such problems rigorously using relaxation and combinatorial integral approximation. An overview of these methods and the known theoretical results concerning convergence and error estimates are provided in a consistent manner. Further, we point to applications with benchmark character as well as to open problems.