A general theorem on error estimates with application to a quasilinear elliptic optimal control problem (Q694532)

The paper is devoted to the studying and developing of a general theory of error analysis for smooth nonlinear programming problems in Banach spaces that can be applied in particular to optimal control problems. In the scientific literature, optimal control problems for Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) (especially in the case of the optimal control under control constraints) are among the most complicated optimization problems. Before solving optimal control problems numerically, they have to be approximated by problems of a simpler nature. An important task here is the design of approximations and their convergence analysis. The authors prove a general theorem on error estimates, which is applied to a class of optimal control problem governed by a class of quasilinear elliptic PDEs. ``The state equation is approximated by a finite element scheme, while different discretization methods are used for the control functions'' (from the abstract). To quantify the discretization error for the optimal solutions of the control problem the distance of locally optimal controls to their discrete approximations is estimated.