Numerical optimal control of instationary gas transport with control and state constraints
- We consider the optimal control of a nonlinear hyperbolic system of balance
laws on a one-dimensional network which arises in the context of gas transport in pipeline
systems. State constraints, which are required for the safe operation of the system, are
incorporated by a barrier method. We discuss the well-posedness of the governing system
of partial differential-algebraic equations and investigate the existence of minimizers. For
the numerical solution, we then consider the approximation of the state equation by
mixed finite elements in space and a particular linear implicit time integration scheme
that can be interpreted as a discontinuous Galerkin approximation. We establish well-
posedness of this discretization scheme and prove the existence of minimizers for the
corresponding discretized optimal control problem and discuss its numerical solution
by a projected Gauß-Newton method. The efficient realization of the Jacobian and
Hessian of the quadratic approximations that have to be minimized in every iteration
of the Gauß-Newton method can be obtained via the solution of discretized sensitivity
and adjoint equations. These are obtained by formal differentiation and transposition
of the Galerkin methods employed for the discretization of the state equations. All
approximations obtained after discretization can thus be interpreted as functions on the
continuous level and, since the functional analytic setting is not changed by the Galerkin
discretization, we observe mesh independence of the resulting fully discrete methods. For
illustration of our theoretical results and to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed
method, we present numerical results for two test problems that model typical situations
that may arise in the daily operation of gas networks.