We develop the dynamic programming approach for a family of infinite horizon boundary control problems with linear state equation and convex cost. We prove that the value function of the problem is the unique regular solution of the associated stationary Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman equation and use this to prove existence and uniqueness of feedback controls. The idea of studying this kind of problem comes from economic applications, in particular from models of optimal investment with vintage capital. Such family of problems has already been studied in the finite horizon case by Faggian. The infinite horizon case is more difficult to treat and it is more interesting from the point of view of economic applications, where what mainly matters is the behavior of optimal trajectories and controls in the long run. The study of infinite horizon is here performed through a nontrivial limiting procedure from the corresponding finite horizon problem.
This work presents a convex-optimization-based framework for analysis and control of nonlinear partial differential equations. The approach uses a particular weak embedding of the nonlinear PDE, resulting in a linear equation in the space of Borel measures. This equation is then used as a constraint of an infinite-dimensional linear programming problem (LP). This LP is then approximated by a hierarchy of convex, finite-dimensional, semidefinite programming problems (SDPs). In the case of analysis of uncontrolled PDEs, the solutions to these SDPs provide bounds on a specified, possibly nonlinea…
We propose to solve polynomial hyperbolic partial differential equations (PDEs) with convex optimization. This approach is based on a very weak notion of solution of the nonlinear equation, namely the measure-valued (mv) solution, satisfying a linear equation in the space of Borel measures. The aim of this paper is, first, to provide the conditions that ensure the equivalence between the two formulations and, second, to introduce a method which approximates the infinite-dimensional linear problem by a hierarchy of convex, finite-dimensional, semidefinite programming problems. This result is th…
We consider the optimal control problem of a general nonlinear spatio-temporal system described by Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). Theory and algorithms for control of spatio-temporal systems are of rising interest among the automatic control community and exhibit numerous challenging characteristic from a control standpoint. Recent methods focus on finite-dimensional optimization techniques of a discretized finite dimensional ODE approximation of the infinite dimensional PDE system. In this paper, we derive a differential dynamic programming (DDP) framework for distributed and boundary…
We propose a local regularization of elliptic optimal control problems which involves the nonconvex $L^q$ fractional penalizations in the cost function. The proposed \emph{Huber type} regularization allows us to formulate the PDE constrained optimization formulation as a DC programming problem (difference of convex functions) that is useful to obtain necessary optimality conditions and tackle its numerical solution by applying the well known DC algorithm used in nonconvex optimization problems. By this procedure we approximate the original problem in terms of a consistent family of parameteriz…
The state reconstruction problem of a heterogeneous dynamic system under sporadic measurements is considered. This system consists of a conversation flow together with a multi-agent network modeling particles within the flow. We propose a partial-state reconstruction algorithm using physics-informed learning based on local measurements obtained from these agents. Traffic density reconstruction is used as an example to illustrate the results and it is shown that the approach provides an efficient noise rejection.
A PDE-based control concept is developed to deploy a multi-agent system into desired formation profiles. The dynamic model is based on a coupled linear, time-variant parabolic distributed parameter system. By means of a particular coupling structure parameter information can be distributed within the agent continuum. Flatness-based motion planning and feedforward control are combined with a backstepping-based boundary controller to stabilise the distributed parameter system of the tracking error. The tracking controller utilises the required state information from a Luenberger-type state obser…
The Dynamic Programming approach allows to compute a feedback control for nonlinear problems, but suffers from the curse of dimensionality. The computation of the control relies on the resolution of a nonlinear PDE, the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation, with the same dimension of the original problem. Recently, a new numerical method to compute the value function on a tree structure has been introduced. The method allows to work without a structured grid and avoids any interpolation. Here, we aim to test the algorithm for nonlinear two dimensional PDEs. We apply model order reduction to decrea…
This paper considers the robust cooperative output regulation for a network of parabolic PDE systems. The solution of this problem is obtained by extending the cooperative internal model principle from finite to infinite dimensions. For a time-invariant digraph describing the communication topology, a two-step backstepping approach is presented to systematically design cooperative state feedback regulators. They allow to solve both the leader-follower and the leaderless output synchronization problem in the presence of disturbances and model uncertainty for a finite-dimensional leader. Solvabi…
Nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) often requires real-time solution to optimization problems. However, in cases where the mathematical model is of high dimension in the solution space, e.g. for solution of partial differential equations (PDEs), black-box optimizers are rarely sufficient to get the required online computational speed. In such cases one must resort to customized solvers. This paper present a new solver for nonlinear time-dependent PDE-constrained optimization problems. It is composed of a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) scheme to solve the PDE-constrained problem …
Optimal control problems including partial differential equation (PDE) as well as integer constraints merge the combinatorial difficulties of integer programming and the challenges related to large-scale systems resulting from discretized PDEs. So far, the Branch-and-Bound framework has been the most common solution strategy for such problems. In order to provide an alternative solution approach, especially in a large-scale context, this article investigates penalization techniques. Taking inspiration from a well-known family of existing exact penalty algorithms, a novel improved penalty algor…
Dynamic games arise when multiple agents with differing objectives choose control inputs to a dynamic system. Dynamic games model a wide variety of applications in economics, defense, and energy systems. However, compared to single-agent control problems, the computational methods for dynamic games are relatively limited. As in the single-agent case, only very specialized dynamic games can be solved exactly, and so approximation algorithms are required. This paper extends the differential dynamic programming algorithm from single-agent control to the case of non-zero sum full-information dynam…
We consider infinite horizon dynamic programming problems, where the control at each stage consists of several distinct decisions, each one made by one of several agents. In an earlier work we introduced a policy iteration algorithm, where the policy improvement is done one-agent-at-a-time in a given order, with knowledge of the choices of the preceding agents in the order. As a result, the amount of computation for each policy improvement grows linearly with the number of agents, as opposed to exponentially for the standard all-agents-at-once method. For the case of a finite-state discounted …
