Abstract
Hybrid control systems are dynamical systems that can be controlled by a combination of both continuous and discrete actions. In this paper we study the approximation of optimal control problems associated to this kind of systems, and in particular of the quasi-variational inequality which characterizes the value function. Our main result features the error estimates between the value function of the problem and its approximation. We also focus on the hypotheses describing the mathematical model and the properties defining the class of numerical scheme for which the result holds true.
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This work is partially supported by the EU under the 7th Framework Programme Marie Curie Initial Training Network “FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN”, SADCO project, GA Number 264735-SADCO. For the second and third authors, also by iCODE Institute project funded by the IDEX Paris-Saclay, ANR-11-IDEX-0003-02. The first author has also been funded by Roma Tre University and INdAM–GNCS.
Appendix
Appendix
1.1 A.1 The Upper Bounds of Lipschitz Constants
Proof of Lemma 5.2
For \(q \in \mathbb I\) and \(\epsilon >0\), set
Let \(x_0,y_0\in {\mathbb R}^d\) such that \(m_{\epsilon } = \varphi (x_0,y_0)\). Taking into account the HJB equation satisfied by w and applying the notion of viscosity solution, we get:
Two cases have to be considered.
-
1.
The max is attained by its first argument.
In this case, we get
$$\begin{aligned} \lambda w(y_0,q)+H(y_0,q,p_y) - \lambda w(x_0,q) - H(x_0,q,p_x)\ge 0 \end{aligned}$$where
$$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} p_x&=\delta (x_0-y_0)+\epsilon x_0\\ p_y&= \delta (x_0-y_0)-\epsilon y_0. \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$This is a standard case (see [1]), and we have that
$$\begin{aligned} w(x,q)-w(y,q) \le \frac{L_\ell }{\lambda -L_f}|x-y|. \end{aligned}$$ -
2.
The max is attained by its second argument.
In this case,
$$\begin{aligned} w(y_0,q)-\Phi (y_0,q)-w(x_0,q)+\Phi (x_0,q)\ge 0, \end{aligned}$$so that we get \(w(x_0,q)-w(y_0,q) \le L_{\Phi }|x_0-y_0|\), and we can infer that
$$\begin{aligned} m_{\epsilon } \le L_{\Phi }|x_0-y_0|-\frac{\delta }{2}|x_0-y_0|^2. \end{aligned}$$(8.1)Setting \(r:=|x_0-y_0|\), we have \(\max _{r\ge 0} \left\{ L_{\Phi }r-\frac{\delta }{2} r^2\right\} =L_{\Phi }^2/2 \delta \), and hence we obtain
$$\begin{aligned} m_{\epsilon }\le \frac{L_{\Phi }^2}{2 \delta }. \end{aligned}$$(8.2)Define now \(m:=\lim _{\epsilon \rightarrow 0} m_{\epsilon }\). Applying a simple calculus argument (see [14, Lemma 2.3]), for fixed \(\delta \), we have:
$$\begin{aligned} m=\sup _{x,y \in {\mathbb R}^d}\big \{w(x,q)-w(y,q)-\delta |x-y|^2\big \} \le \frac{L_{\Phi }^2}{2 \delta }, \end{aligned}$$where the inequality follows from (8.2). Therefore, by definition of m, we have that:
$$\begin{aligned} w(x,q)-w(y,q) \le \frac{L_{\Phi }^2}{2 \delta }+\frac{\delta }{2}|x-y|^2. \end{aligned}$$Observing now that
$$\begin{aligned} \min _{\delta \ge 0} \left\{ \frac{L_{\Phi }^2}{2 \delta }+\frac{\delta }{2}|x-y|^2\right\} =L_{\Phi }|x-y|, \end{aligned}$$we finally obtain:
$$\begin{aligned} w(x,q)-w(y,q) \le L_{\Phi }|x-y|. \end{aligned}$$
In conclusion, for both cases, we have
and, using similar arguments, we can also bound \(L_{w^{\epsilon }}\) as:
\(\square \)
1.2 A.2 Lipschitz Stability for the SL Scheme
In this section, we prove that the numerical approximation \(w_h\) for the solution w of the obstacle problem is Lipschitz continuous. We consider schemes approximating (5.1) in the fixed point form:
where, in the case of Semi-Lagrangian schemes, the operator \(\Sigma ^h\) reads
where \(\Pi _{\Delta x}\) is an interpolation operator based on a space grid of step \(\Delta x\). It is well-known that \(\Sigma ^h\) is non-expansive in the \(\infty \)-norm, provided the interpolation operator \(\Pi _{\Delta x}\) is monotone (see [11]).
Theorem A.1
Under assumptions (A1)–(A6), (S1)–(S4), the solution \(W_h\) of problem (6.1) obtained with the Semi-Lagrangian scheme (8.3)–(8.4) is Lipschitz continuous with
Proof
For \((x,q) \in {\mathbb R}^d\times \mathbb I\), consider the iterative solution of the fixed point equation (8.3):
where \(W^{(k)}_h\) is the approximation of \(W_h\) at the k–th iteration. For any \(x_1,x_2\in {\mathbb R}^d\), we have
By setting
we have
Note that, if \(M_{k}\le 1+m\), then \(e^{-m}M_k\le e^{-m}(1+m)\le 1\). Hence,
It suffices therefore to initialize the fixed point iterations with \(W^{(0)}_h\) such that \(M_0=0\) to guarantee \(M_k\le 1+m\) for every \(k\ge 0\), and, by the definitions of m and \(M_k\), we obtain
which implies
Now, since \(W^{(k)}_h\) converges towards the solution \(W_h\) of the scheme (8.3)–(8.4) as \(k \rightarrow +\infty \), we conclude
\(\square \)
1.3 A.3 Estimate on the perturbed value function of the stopping problem
The cost function corresponding to the stopping problem can be defined as :
where \(\Phi : {\mathbb R}\rightarrow {\mathbb R}\) is Lipschitz continuous. Then, the value function given by:
satisfies (5.1). Now, for a given \(\varepsilon \), we replace the dynamics (2.1) with (6.8), and define the value function \(w^\varepsilon \):
with \(\Theta ^\varepsilon :=\mathcal {U}\times \mathbb {R}_+ \times \mathcal {F}^\varepsilon \) and
With this definition, the value function \(w^\varepsilon \) is the unique solution of the equation:
here, we have used the notation \(\cdot ^\varepsilon \) to distinguish between the quantities related to the perturbed problems and the ones related to the unperturbed problem. Note that the equations in the system (8.5) [reps. (8.5)] are not connected. So in the sequel, we will drop the dependency with respect to q.
The rest of this section is dedicated to deriving an estimate for the difference between \(w^\varepsilon \) and w. Since every control \(\theta \in \Theta ^0\) can be considered as an admissible control in \(\Theta ^\varepsilon \) with a perturbation function \(e\equiv 0\). Hence, we have:
Let \(\theta =(u,\xi )\in \Theta ^0\) and let \(e\in {\mathcal F}^\varepsilon \) for some \(\varepsilon >0\). Let X be a trajectory solution of (2.1) associated to \(\theta \) and let \(X^\varepsilon \) solution of (6.8) associated to \(\theta ^\varepsilon =(u,\xi ,e)\). For every \(t>0\), we have:
Then applying Grönwall’s inequality we obtain
We can now derive the estimate error between the solutions of problems (6.6) and (5.1).
Theorem A.2
Assume (A1)–(A6) hold. Then, for every \(x \in \mathbb {R}^d\) and \(\varepsilon >0\) we have:
Proof
From the definition of the value function \(w^\varepsilon \) we know that for each \(\delta > 0\) there exists \(\theta _\delta ^\varepsilon =(u_\delta ,\xi _\delta ,e_\delta )\in \Theta ^\varepsilon \) such that
Set \(\theta _\delta =(u_\delta ,\xi _\delta )\) and denote by \(X^{\varepsilon }_{\delta ,x}\) [resp. \(X_{\delta ,x}\)] the solution of (6.8) (resp. of (2.1)) associated to \(u_\delta \). It follows that
The above estimate being valid for any \(\delta >0\), we can conclude that the statement of the theorem is proved. \(\square \)
1.4 A.4 Estimate on the Perturbed Numerical Approximation
We want to examine here the difference between the numerical approximations of respectively the HJB equation with a given (known) obstacle and its perturbed version in the case of a Semi-Lagrangian scheme.
We recall that the unperturbed system is
It can be approximated with the scheme
The perturbed SL scheme is obtained by replacing \(\Sigma ^h\) in (8.9) with the mapping
We start by giving the following general result:
Theorem A.3
Let (A1)–(A6) and (S1)–(S9) hold, and let \(W_h\) and \(W_h^\varepsilon \) be respectively solution of (8.9) and its perturbed version (8.10) with \(\Phi \) finite or infinite. Then, the perturbed SL scheme has a unique bounded and uniformly Lipschitz continuous solution \(W_h^\varepsilon \).
Proof
It suffices to note that, with the addition of the term e, the problem still satisfies the basic assumptions, and all the relevant constants of the problem remain unchanged. Then, the result follows from Theorem A.1, implying
\(\square \)
Let now \(W^\varepsilon _h\) denote the numerical solution for the perturbed SL scheme. We prove the following.
Theorem A.4
Let (A1)–(A6) and (S1)–(S9) hold, and let \(W_h\) and \(W_h^\varepsilon \) be respectively solution of (8.9) and its perturbed version (8.10) with \(\Phi \) finite or infinite. Then, for \(\varepsilon \) and h small enough, we have
with
Proof
We recall that both the exact and the approximate solutions for either the original or the perturbed problem are Lipschitz continuous.
Using a scheme in fixed point SL form, the unperturbed QVI is approximated by (8.9), whereas its perturbed version is given by
The plan is to apply the two schemes to Lipschitz continuous numerical solutions \(W_h\) and \(W^\varepsilon _h\) and estimate, for the various operators, differences of the form
Using now, for \(T=\mathcal {T}^h,\mathcal {T}^{\varepsilon ,h},\Sigma ^h,\Sigma ^{\varepsilon ,h}\) and \(U=W_h,W^{\varepsilon }_h\), the shorthand notation
we can single out three cases:
-
(a)
\(\mathcal {T}^h(x,q,W_h)=\Sigma ^h(x,q,W_h)\) and \(\mathcal {T}^{\varepsilon ,h}(x,q,W_h^\varepsilon )= \Sigma ^{\varepsilon ,h}(x,q,W_h^\varepsilon )\).
In this case, we can bound the first term in the right-hand side of (8.13) as
$$\begin{aligned} \big | \mathcal {T}^h(x,q,W_h) - \mathcal {T}^h(x,q,W^\varepsilon _h) \big |_0= & {} \big | \Sigma ^h(x,q,W_h) - \Sigma ^h(x,q,W^\varepsilon _h)\big |_0 \nonumber \\\le & {} (1-\lambda h)\big |W_h - W^\varepsilon _h\big |_0, \end{aligned}$$(8.14)which is a known property of the SL scheme. For the second, considering the Lipschitz continuity of \(\ell \) and f and the bound on |e|, we have
$$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} \big |\ell (x,q,u) - \ell (x+e,q,u)\big |&\le L_\ell \varepsilon , \\ \big |f(x,q,u) - f(x+e,q,u)\big |&\le L_f \varepsilon \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$so that, taking into account the Lipschitz continuity of \(W_h\), by a standard argument we obtain
$$\begin{aligned} \big |\Sigma ^h(x,q,W_h) - \Sigma ^{\varepsilon ,h}(x,q,W_h) \big |_0 \le (L_\ell + L_{W_h} L_f)h \varepsilon . \end{aligned}$$(8.15) -
(b)
\(\mathcal {T}^h(x,q,W_h)=\Phi (x,q) =\mathcal {T}^{\varepsilon ,h}(x,q,W_h^\varepsilon )\). In this case there is nothing else to prove.
-
(c)
The \(\min \) is achieved by different operators, e.g., let \(\mathcal {T}^h(x,q,W_h)=\Sigma ^h(x,q,W_h)\) and \(\mathcal {T}^h(x,q,W^\varepsilon _h)=\Phi (x,q)\). Working in terms of unilateral estimates, we have
$$\begin{aligned} \mathcal {T}^h(x,q,W_h) - \mathcal {T}^h(x,q,W^\varepsilon _h)= & {} \Sigma ^h(x,q,W_h) - \Phi (x,q) \\\le & {} \Phi (x,q) - \Phi (x,q) = 0 \end{aligned}$$in which we get the inequality by replacing the argmin in \(\Theta ^h(x,q,W_h)\) with the other choice. In a parallel form, we obtain the reverse inequality, as
$$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} \mathcal {T}^h(x,q,W^\varepsilon _h) - \mathcal {T}^h(x,q,W_h)&= \Phi (x,q) - \Sigma ^h(x,q,W_h) \le \\&\le \Sigma ^h(x,q,W^\varepsilon _h) - \Sigma ^h(x,q,W_h)\le \\&\le (1-\lambda h)|W_h - W^\varepsilon _h|_0 \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$The same arguments can then be applied to the case in which the choice of the operators is reversed, so that we finally obtain (8.14).
We obtain therefore, by iterating the estimate (8.13) in (8.9) and (8.12) from the same initial guess \(W_{h}^{(0)}=W^{\varepsilon (0)}_h\):
$$\begin{aligned} | W_h - W^{\varepsilon }_h|_0 \le (L_\ell + L_{W_h}L_f)\varepsilon h \sum _{k\ge 0} (1-\lambda h)^k = \frac{L_\ell + L_{W_h}L_f}{\lambda } \varepsilon \end{aligned}$$
We can therefore conclude by collecting all the cases above in the bound
\(\square \)
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Ferretti, R., Sassi, A. & Zidani, H. Error Estimates for Numerical Approximation of Hamilton–Jacobi Equations Related to Hybrid Control Systems. Appl Math Optim 83, 139–175 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00245-018-9515-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00245-018-9515-8