Optimal control of level sets generated by the normal flow equation

The goal of this work is the optimal control of level sets generated by the normal flow equation. The problem consists in finding the normal velocity that minimizes a given performance index expressed by means of a cost functional. In this perspective, a sufficient condition of optimality requiring the solution of a system of partial differential equations is derived. As in general it is difficult to solve such a system, an approximation scheme based on the extended Ritz method is proposed to find suboptimal solutions. The control law is forced to take on a fixed structure depending nonlinearly on a finite number of parameters to be suitably chosen. The selection of the parameters is accomplished by using a gradient-based technique. To this end, the adjoint equation is derived to compute the gradient of the cost functional with respect to the parameters of the control law. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is shown by means of simulations.