Optimal Control of Partial Differential Equations in Optimal Design

Abstract: This thesis concerns the approximation of optimally controlled partial differential equations for inverse problems in optimal design. Important examples of such problems are optimal material design and parameter reconstruction. In optimal material design the goal is to construct a material that meets some optimality criterion, e.g. to design a beam, with fixed weight, that is as stiff as possible. Parameter reconstrucion concerns, for example, the problem to find the interior structure of a material from surface displacement measurements resulting from applied external forces.Optimal control problems, particularly for partial differential equations, are often ill-posed and need to be regularized to obtain good approximations. We here use the theory of the corresponding Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations to construct regularizations and derive error estimates for optimal design problems. The constructed Pontryagin method is a simple and general method where the first, analytical, step is to regularize the Hamiltonian. Next its Hamiltonian system is computed efficiently with the Newton method using a sparse Jacobian. An error estimate for the difference between exact and approximate objective functions is derived, depending only on the difference of the Hamiltonian and its finite dimensional regularization along the solution path and its L² projection, i.e. not on the difference of the exact and approximate solutions to the Hamiltonian systems.Another treated issue is the relevance of input data for parameter reconstruction problems, where the goal is to determine a spacially distributed coefficient of a partial differential equation from partial observations of the solution. It is here shown that the choice of input data, that generates the partial observations, affects the reconstruction, and that it is possible to formulate meaningful optimality criteria for the input data that enhances the quality of the reconstructed coefficient.In the thesis we present solutions to various applications in optimal material design and reconstruction.