Solving nonlinear optimal control problems with state and control delays by shooting methods combined with numerical continuation on the delays

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel numerical continuation method combined with shooting techniques to efficiently solve nonlinear optimal control problems with delays, ensuring convergence from non-delayed to delayed solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a homotopy-based approach starting from non-delayed problems and guarantees convergence of solutions as delays are gradually introduced.

Findings

Method successfully solves delayed optimal control problems.

Convergence theorem ensures solution stability with respect to delays.

Numerical examples demonstrate efficiency and robustness.

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a new procedure to solve nonlinear optimal control problems with delays which exploits indirect methods combined with numerical homotopy procedures. It is known that solving this kind of problems via indirect methods (which arise from the Pontrya-gin Maximum Principle) is complex and computationally demanding because their implementation is faced to two main difficulties: the extremal equations involve forward and backward terms, and besides, the related shooting method has to be carefully initialized. Here, starting from the solution of the non-delayed version of the optimal control problem, delays are introduced by a numerical continuation. This creates a sequence of optimal delayed solutions that converges to the desired solution. We establish a convergence theorem ensuring the continuous dependence w.r.t. the delay of the optimal state, of the optimal control (in a weak sense) and of the corresponding adjoint vector. The convergence of the adjoint vector represents the most challenging step to prove and it is crucial for the well-posedness of the proposed homotopy procedure. Two numerical examples are proposed and analyzed to show the efficiency of this approach.