Ill-conditioning versus ill-posedness for the boundary controllability of the heat equation

Abstract

AbstractIll-posedness and/or ill-conditioning are features users have to deal with appropriately in the controllability of diffusion problems for secure and reliable outputs. We investigate those issues in the case of a boundary Dirichlet control, in an attempt to underline the origin of the troubles arising in the numerical computations and to shed some light on the difficulties to obtain good quality simulations. The exact-controllability is severely ill-posed while, in spite of its well-posedness, the null-controllability turns out to be very badly ill-conditioned. Theoretical and numerical results are stated on the heat equation in one dimension to illustrate the specific instabilities of each problem. The main tools used here are first a characterization of the subspace where the HUM (Hilbert Uniqueness Method) control lies and the study of the spectrum of some structured matrices, of Pick and Löwner type, obtained from the Fourier calculations on the state and adjoint equations.