Variational Calculus, Optimal Control and Applications

de Schmidt, Werner H.

Variational Calculus, Optimal Control and Applications was the topic of the 12th Baltic Sea conference, traditionally an important meeting place for scientists from Eastern and Western Europe as well as the USA. This work contains contributions presented at that conference and addresses four problem complexes mostly motivated by practical problems. The starting points are often questions taken from flight dynamics. The first chapter deals with existence theory and optimality conditions needed for justification of, and used in, numerical algorithms. Analysis and synthesis of control systems and dynamic programming are presented in the second chapter. A modern interpretation of a solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation is given. This is closely connected to the question of real-time or feedback control. Recent advances in the field of numerical methods and their applications to flight path optimization and fluid dynamics follow. The reader will find nonlinear programming methods, accelerated multiple shooting, homotopy and SQP methods. A wide variety of applications to mechanical and aerospace systems concludes this work: space flight problems, mobile robot controlling, geometrical extremal problems, fluid transport, fluid waves and human sciences.