A direct study of the Riccati equation arising in hyperbolic boundary control problems (Q1081106)

This paper gives a unified abstract study of the Riccati integral equation arising in quadratic cost boundary control problems (via the Dirichlet boundary conditions) for second order hyperbolic equations and for first order hyperbolic systems. Under appropriate hypotheses, which are shown to be satisfied in the above two cases, the authors prove the existence and the uniqueness, within a certain class, of the solution of the Riccati equation. Contrary to the usual technique which starts from the control problem and uses the optimality conditions, here a direct argument is given which consists in two main steps: a local existence result and an a priori estimate. This provides a deeper insight in the relationship between the Riccati equation and the control problem, as in the parabolic case. The uniqueness result, obtained by this approach is new.