Optimal control of lake eutrophication (Q6177069)

The authors consider a domain \(\Omega \) in \(\mathbb{R}^{3}\), which represents a lake, with a \(C^{1}\) boundary \(\partial \Omega \) which is the union of three disjoint sets \(\partial \Omega =\Gamma _{\mathrm{in}}\cup \Gamma _{\mathrm{out}}\cup \Gamma \), where \(\Gamma _{\mathrm{in}}\) is the lake entrance and \(\Gamma _{\mathrm{out}}\) is the lake exit (\(\Gamma _{\mathrm{in}}\) and \(\Gamma _{\mathrm{out}}\) being not necessarily connected). They consider the space-time dynamics of the phosphorus stock \(\overline{S}\) and of the cyanobacteria concentration \(c\) in the lake written in \(\Omega \times (0,T)\) as: \(\partial _{t}\overline{S} +\operatorname{div}(v\overline{S})-d_{s}\Delta \overline{S}+b(\overline{S})\overline{S}-h( \overline{S})+f(\overline{S},c)c=0\), \(\partial _{t}c+\operatorname{div}(vc)-d_{c}\Delta c+m(c)c-f(\overline{S},c)c=0\), where \(v\) is the velocity which governs the convection, \(d_{s}\) and \(d_{c}\) diffusion coefficients, \(b\) and \(m\) nonlinear functions which represent the rates of loss per unit stock and per cyanobacteria concentration, \(h(\overline{S})=\overline{S}^{2}/(k+\overline{S }^{2})\) models the internal discharge of the phosphorus trapped in the sediments, and \(f\) the Monod term, often chosen in the form \(f(\overline{S} )=u_{max}\overline{S}/(k_{s}+\overline{S})\), which relates the phosphorus stock with the cyanobacterial dynamics, \(u_{\max}\) representing the maximal increasing rate and \(k_{s}\) the half-saturation value. The initial conditions \(\overline{S}\mid _{t=0}=\overline{S}_{0}\), \(c\mid _{t=0}=c_{0}\) are imposed in \(\Omega \), together with the boundary conditions: \((\overline{ S}v-d_{s}\nabla \overline{S})\cdot n=(cv-d_{c}\nabla c)\cdot n=0\), on \( (0,T)\times \Gamma \), \(r_{S}\overline{S}+(\overline{S}v-d_{s}\nabla \overline{S})\cdot n=R_{S}(\overline{S})\), with \(r_{S}\leq 0\), \( r_{c}c+(cv-d_{c}\nabla c)\cdot n=R_{c}(c)\), with \(r_{c}\leq 0\), on \( (0,T)\times \Gamma _{\mathrm{out}}\), \(\overline{S}=\overline{P}\), \((cv-d_{c}\nabla c)\cdot n=0\), on \((0,T)\times \Gamma _{\mathrm{in}}\). Assuming further hypotheses on the different terms of the parabolic problem, the authors prove the existence of a unique weak solution \((\overline{S},c)\in (L^{2}(0,T;H^{1}(\Omega ))\cap L^{\infty }(0,T;L^{2}(\Omega ))^{2}\) to this problem. For the proof, the authors propose a variational formulation of the above parabolic problem and they use the Faedo-Galerkin method, maximum principles and a uniqueness result. They then propose an optimal control associated to the above problem written as: Find \((\overline{P}^{\ast }, \overline{S}^{\ast },c^{\ast })\) such that \(J(\overline{P}^{\ast },c^{\ast })=\max\{J(\overline{P},c)\); \(\overline{P}\in E\) with \((\overline{S},c)\) satisfying the above parabolic problem\(\}\). Here \(E\) is the set of admissible controls defined as \(E=\{\overline{P}\in L^{\infty }((0,T)\times \Gamma _{in})\); \(0\leq \overline{P}(t,x)\leq \overline{P}_{\max}\) a.e. in \( (0,T)\times \Gamma _{in}\}\), where \(\overline{P}_{\max}\) is any given real number, and \(J\) the objective function defined as: \(J(\overline{P} ,c)=\int_{0}^{T}\left( \int_{\Gamma _{\mathrm{in}}}B(t,\sigma ,\overline{P}(t,\sigma ))e^{-\rho t}d\sigma -\int_{\Omega }D(t,x,c(t,x))e^{-\rho t}dx\right) dt\), where \(\rho \in ]0,1[\) is the social discount rate and \((\overline{S},c)\) satisfies the above parabolic problem. Setting \(S=\overline{S}-P\), where \(P\) is the unique solution to: \(\partial _{t}P-d_{s}\Delta P=0\) in \(\Omega \times (0,T)\), \(P\mid _{t=0}=P_{0}\) in \(\Omega \), \(P\mid _{\Gamma _{in}}= \overline{P}\), \(P\mid _{\partial \Omega \setminus \Gamma _{\mathrm{in}}}=0\) on \( \partial \Omega \times (0,T)\), \(P_{0}\) being the solution to: \(-\Delta P_{0}=0\) in \(\Omega \), \(P\mid _{\Gamma _{in}}=\overline{P}\mid _{t=0}\), \( P_{0}\mid _{\partial \Omega \setminus \Gamma _{in}}=0\) on \(\partial \Omega \times (0,T)\), the authors rewrite the above problem and the optimal control problem. Under the same hypotheses as in the existence and uniqueness result for a weak solution to the parabolic problem, they prove the existence of a global solution \((\overline{P}^{\ast },\overline{S}^{\ast },c^{\ast })\) to the optimal control problem. The proof is based on some boundedness property of a maximizing sequence for the objective function \(J\) and on the analysis of the convergence of this sequence.