Optimal Distributed Control for a Cahn-Hilliard-Darcy System with Mass Sources, Unmatched Viscosities and Singular Potential

TL;DR

This paper develops an optimal control framework for a complex tumor growth model based on a Cahn-Hilliard-Darcy system, establishing well-posedness, differentiability, and optimality conditions in a two-dimensional setting.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optimal control approach for a tumor growth model with unmatched viscosities and singular potential, including existence, uniqueness, and differentiability results.

Findings

Proved existence and uniqueness of global strong solutions.

Established differentiability of the control-to-state mapping.

Derived first-order optimality conditions and second-order sufficient conditions.

Abstract

We study a Cahn-Hilliard-Darcy system with mass sources, which can be considered as a basic, though simplified, diffuse interface model for the evolution of tumor growth. This system is equipped with an impermeability condition for the (volume) averaged velocity $\mathbf{u}$ as well as homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions for the phase function $\varphi$ and the chemical potential $\mu$. The source term in the convective Cahn-Hilliard equation contains a control $R$ that can be thought, for instance, as a drug or a nutrient in applications. Our goal is to study a distributed optimal control problem in the two dimensional setting with a cost functional of tracking-type. In the physically relevant case with unmatched viscosities for the binary fluid mixtures and a singular potential, we first prove the existence and uniqueness of a global strong solution with $\varphi$ being strictly separated from the pure phases $\pm 1$. This well-posedness result enables us to characterize the control-to-state mapping $\mathcal{S}:R \mapsto \varphi$. Then we obtain the existence of an optimal control, the Fr\'{e}chet differentiability of $\mathcal{S}$ and first-order necessary optimality conditions expressed through a suitable variational inequality for the adjoint variables. Finally, we prove the differentiability of the control-to-costate operator and establish a second-order sufficient condition for the strict local optimality.