Control of Coupled Partial Differential Equations (International Series of Numerical Mathematics, 155)

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.