Second-Order Necessary Conditions for Stochastic Optimal Control Problems

The main purpose of this paper is to present some of our recent results about the second-order necessary conditions for stochastic optimal controls with the control variable entering into both the drift and the diffusion terms. In particular, when the control region is convex, a pointwise second-order necessary condition for stochastic singular optimal controls in the classical sense is established, whereas when the control region is allowed to be nonconvex, we obtain a pointwise second-order necessary condition for stochastic singular optimal controls in the sense of the Pontryagin-type maximum principle. Unlike deterministic optimal control problems or stochastic optimal control problems with control-independent diffusions, there exist some essential difficulties in deriving the pointwise second-order necessary optimality conditions from the integral conditions when the controls act in the diffusion terms of the stochastic control systems. Some techniques from Malliavin calculus are employed to overcome...