Some Optimal Control Techniques

The intent of this chapter is to introduce fundamental concepts of optimal control theory that are relevant to the applications treated in the following Chapters. Emphasis will be given to clear, methodical development rather than rigorous formal proofs. The fundamental conditions of the variational calculus for dynamic system optimization are discussed in Section 2.2. A brief summary of Pontryagin’s maximum principle is given in Section 2.3. In Section 2.4 the functional analytic technique of formulating optimization problems in the minimum norm form is dealt with. A brief treatment of some basic concepts from functional analysis is given prior to stating one powerful version of minimum norm problems.