Optimal Control of a Class of Strongly Nonlinear Parabolic Systems*

This paper considers some typical optimal control problems for a class of strongly nonlinear parabolic systems. After some necessary preparation, it is shown that the family of admissible trajectories is a weakly closed and weakly sequentially compact subset of a reflexive Banach space and that the set of attainable states at any given time is a weakly compact subset of a Hilbert space. Using these basic results, proofs of existence of optimal controls are presented. A terminal control problem, a special Bolza problem, and a time optimal control problem are solved, and the necessary conditions of optimality for the corresponding control problems are given.