Mahamadi Warma

Harbir Antil, Ratna Khatri, Mahamadi Warma

Very recently M. Warma has shown that for nonlocal PDEs associated with the fractional Laplacian, the classical notion of controllability from the boundary does not make sense and therefore it must be replaced by a control that is localized outside the open set where the PDE is solved. Having learned from the above mentioned result, in this paper we introduce a new class of source identification and optimal control problems where the source/control is located outside the observation domain where the PDE is satisfied. The classical diffusion models lack this flexibility as they assume that the source/control is located either inside or on the boundary. This is essentially due to the locality property of the underlying operators. We use the nonlocality of the fractional operator to create a framework that now allows placing a source/control outside the observation domain. We consider the Dirichlet, Robin and Neumann source identification or optimal control problems. These problems require dealing with the nonlocal normal derivative (that we shall call interaction operator). We create a functional analytic framework and show well-posedness and derive the first order optimality conditions for these problems. We introduce a new approach to approximate, with convergence rate, the Dirichlet problem with nonzero exterior condition. The numerical examples confirm our theoretical findings and illustrate the practicality of our approach.

Harbir Antil, Mahamadi Warma

In this paper we consider the optimal control of semilinear fractional PDEs with both spectral and integral fractional diffusion operators of order $2s$ with $s \in (0,1)$. We first prove the boundedness of solutions to both semilinear fractional PDEs under minimal regularity assumptions on domain and data. We next introduce an optimal growth condition on the nonlinearity to show the Lipschitz continuity of the solution map for the semilinear elliptic equations with respect to the data. We further apply our ideas to show existence of solutions to optimal control problems with semilinear fractional equations as constraints. Under the standard assumptions on the nonlinearity (twice continuously differentiable) we derive the first and second order optimality conditions.

Harbir Antil, Deepanshu Verma, Mahamadi Warma

This paper introduces the notion of state constraints for optimal control problems governed by fractional elliptic PDEs of order $s \in (0,1)$. There are several mathematical tools that are developed during the process to study this problem, for instance, the characterization of the dual of the fractional order Sobolev spaces and well-posedness of fractional PDEs with measure-valued datum. These tools are widely applicable. We show well-posedness of the optimal control problem and derive the first order optimality conditions. Notice that the adjoint equation is a fractional PDE with measure as the right-hand-side datum. We use the characterization of the fractional order dual spaces to study the regularity of the state and adjoint equations. We emphasize that the classical case ($s=1$) was considered by E. Casas in \cite{ECasas_1986a} but almost none of the existing results are applicable to our fractional case.

Harbir Antil, Mahamadi Warma

In this paper we study optimal control problems with either fractional or regional fractional $p$-Laplace equation, of order $s$ and $p\in [2,\infty)$, as constraints over a bounded open set with Lipschitz continuous boundary. The control, which fulfills the pointwise box constraints, is given by the coefficient of the involved operator. To overcome the degeneracy of both fractional $p$-Laplacians, we introduce a regularization for both operators. We show existence and uniqueness of solution to the regularized state equations and existence of solution to the regularized optimal control problems. We also prove several auxiliary results for the regularized problems which are of independent interest. We conclude with the convergence of the regularized solutions.

Harbir Antil, Deepanshu Verma, Mahamadi Warma

In this paper we introduce a new notion of optimal control, or source identification in inverse, problems with fractional parabolic PDEs as constraints. This new notion allows a source/control placement outside the domain where the PDE is fulfilled. We tackle the Dirichlet, the Neumann and the Robin cases. For the fractional elliptic PDEs this has been recently investigated by the authors in \cite{HAntil_RKhatri_MWarma_2018a}. The need for these novel optimal control concepts stems from the fact that the classical PDE models only allow placing the source/control either on the boundary or in the interior where the PDE is satisfied. However, the nonlocal behavior of the fractional operator now allows placing the control in the exterior. We introduce the notions of weak and very-weak solutions to the parabolic Dirichlet problem. We present an approach on how to approximate the parabolic Dirichlet solutions by the parabolic Robin solutions (with convergence rates). A complete analysis for the Dirichlet and Robin optimal control problems has been discussed. The numerical examples confirm our theoretical findings and further illustrate the potential benefits of nonlocal models over the local ones.

Harbir Antil, Johannes Pfefferer, Mahamadi Warma

In this paper we study existence, regularity, and approximation of solution to a fractional semilinear elliptic equation of order $s \in (0,1)$. We identify minimal conditions on the nonlinear term and the source which leads to existence of weak solutions and uniform $L^\infty$-bound on the solutions. Next we realize the fractional Laplacian as a Dirichlet-to-Neumann map via the Caffarelli-Silvestre extension. We introduce a first-degree tensor product finite elements space to approximate the truncated problem. We derive a priori error estimates and conclude with an illustrative numerical example.