Control of Coupled Partial Differential Equations

The international Conference on Optimal Control of Coupled Systems of Partial Di'erential Equations was held at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Ob- wolfach (www.mfo.de) from April, 17 to 23, 2005. The scienti'c program included 30 talks coveringvarious topics as controllability,feedback-control,optimality s- tems, model-reduction techniques, analysis and optimal control of ?ow problems and ?uid-structure interactions, as well as problems of shape and topology op- mization. The applications discussed during the conference range from the op- mization and control of quantum mechanical systems, the design of piezo-electric acoustic micro-mechanical devices, optimal control of crystal growth, the control of bodies immersed into a ?uid to airfoil design and much more. Thus the app- cations are across all time and length scales. Optimization and control of systems governed by partial di'erential eq- tions and more recently by variational inequalities is a very active ?eld of research in Applied Mathematics, in particular in numerical analysis, scienti'c comp- ing and optimization. In order to able to handle real-world applications, scalable and parallelizable algorithms have to be designed, implemented and validated. This requires an in-depth understanding of both the theoretical properties and the numerical realization of such structural insights. Therefore, a 'core' devel- ment within the ?eld of optimization with PDE-constraints such as the analysis of control-and-state-constrained problems, the role of obstacles, multi-phases etc. and an interdisciplinary 'diagonal' bridging regarding applications and numerical simulation are most important.