A design optimization problem for an elastic beam with a unilateral elastic foundation is analyzed. Euler-Bernoulli's model for the beam and Winkler's model for the foundation are considered. The state problem is represented by a nonlinear semicoercive problem of 4th order with mixed boundary conditions. The thickness of the beam and the stiffness of the foundation are optimized with respect to a cost functional. We establish solvability conditions for the state problem and study the existence of...

The aim of the present paper is to study problems of optimal design in mechanics, whose variational form are inequalities expressing the principle of virtual power in its inequality form. We consider an optimal control problem in whixh the state of the system (involving an elliptic, linear symmetric operator, the coefficients of which are chosen as the design - control variables) is defined as the (unique) solution of stationary variational inequalities. The existence result proved in Section 1...

The aim of the present paper is to study problems of optimal design in mechanics, whose variational form is given by inequalities expressing the principle of virtual power in its inequality form. The elliptic, linear symmetric operators as well as convex sets of possible states depend on the control parameter. The existence theorem for the optimal control is applied to design problems for an elastic laminated plate whose variable thickness appears as a control variable.

We deal with an optimal control problem with respect to a variable thickness for a dynamic viscoelastic plate with velocity constraints. The state problem has the form of a pseudohyperbolic variational inequality. The existence and uniqueness theorem for the state problem and the existence of an optimal thickness function are proved.

Slightly below the transition temperatures, the behavior of superconducting materials is governed by the Ginzburg-Landau (GL) equation which characterizes the dynamical interaction of the density of superconducting electron pairs and the exited electromagnetic potential. In this paper, an optimal control problem of the strength of external magnetic field for one-dimensional thin film superconductors with respect to a convex criterion functional is considered. It is formulated as a nonlinear coefficient...

The Linear-Quadratic (LQ) optimal control problem is studied for a class of first-order hyperbolic partial differential equation models by using a nonlinear infinite-dimensional (distributed parameter) Hilbert state-space description. First the dynamical properties of the linearized model around some equilibrium profile are studied. Next the LQ-feedback operator is computed by using the corresponding operator Riccati algebraic equation whose solution is obtained via a related matrix Riccati differential...

In the framework of transport theory, we are interested in the following optimization problem: given the distributions ${\mu }^{+}$ of working people and ${\mu }^{-}$ of their working places in an urban area, build a transportation network (such as a railway or an underground system) which minimizes a functional depending on the geometry of the network through a particular cost function. The functional is defined as the Wasserstein distance of ${\mu }^{+}$ from ${\mu }^{-}$ with respect to a metric which depends on the transportation network....

In the framework of transport theory, we are interested in the following optimization problem: given the distributions µ+ of working people and µ- of their working places in an urban area, build a transportation network (such as a railway or an underground system) which minimizes a functional depending on the geometry of the network through a particular cost function. The functional is defined as the Wasserstein distance of µ+ from µ- with respect to a metric which depends on the transportation...

In this paper we deepen the study of the nonlinear principal components introduced by Salinelli in 1998, referring to a real random variable. New insights on their probabilistic and statistical meaning are given with some properties. An estimation procedure based on spline functions, adapting to a statistical framework the classical Rayleigh–Ritz method, is introduced. Asymptotic properties of the estimator are proved, providing an upper bound for the rate of convergence under suitable mild conditions....

We consider the dynamic control problem of attaining a target position at a finite time T, while minimizing a linear-quadratic cost functional depending on the position and speed. We assume that the coefficients of the linear-quadratic cost functional are stochastic processes adapted to a Brownian filtration. We provide a probabilistic solution in terms of two coupled backward stochastic differential equations possessing a singularity at the terminal time T. We verify optimality of the candidate...

We consider the Schrödinger operator $-\Delta +V\left(x\right)$ on $H_0^1\left(\Omega \right)$, where $\Omega$ is a given domain of ${ℝ}^d$. Our goal is to study some optimization problems where an optimal potential $V\ge 0$ has to be determined in some suitable admissible classes and for some suitable optimization criteria, like the energy or the Dirichlet eigenvalues.

We present a model for describing the spread of an infectious disease with public screening measures to control the spread. We want to address the problem of determining an optimal screening strategy for a disease characterized by appreciable duration of the infectiveness period and by variability of the transmission risk. The specific disease we have in mind is the HIV infection. However the model will apply to a disease for which class-age structure...

The construction of reduced order models for dynamical systems using proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) is based on the information contained in so-called snapshots. These provide the spatial distribution of the dynamical system at discrete time instances. This work is devoted to optimizing the choice of these time instances in such a manner that the error between the POD-solution and the trajectory of the dynamical system is minimized. First and second order optimality systems are given. Numerical...

The scheduling of angiogenic inhibitors to control a vascularized tumor is analyzed as an optimal control problem for a mathematical model that was developed and biologically validated by Hahnfeldt et al. [Cancer Res. 59 (1999)]. Two formulations of the problem are considered. In the first one the primary tumor volume is minimized for a given amount of angiogenic inhibitors to be administered, while a balance between tumor reduction and the total amount of angiogenic inhibitors given is minimized...

In this paper, we study optimal transportation problems for multifractal random measures. Since these measures are much less regular than optimal transportation theory requires, we introduce a new notion of transportation which is intuitively some kind of multistep transportation. Applications are given for construction of multifractal random changes of times and to the existence of random metrics, the volume forms of which coincide with the multifractal random measures.

Among ${ℝ}^3$-valued triples of random vectors (X,Y,Z) having fixed marginal probability laws, what is the best way to jointly draw (X,Y,Z) in such a way that the simplex generated by (X,Y,Z) has maximal average volume? Motivated by this simple question, we study optimal transportation problems with several marginals when the objective function is the determinant or its absolute value.