Optimal dirichlet control of partial differential equations on networks

Differential equations on metric graphs can describe many phenomena in the physical world but also the spread of information on social media. To efficiently compute the optimal setup of the differential equation for a given desired state is a challenging numerical analysis task. In this work, we focus on the task of solving an optimization problem subject to a linear differential equation on a metric graph with the control defined on a small set of Dirichlet nodes. We discuss the discretization by finite elements and provide rigorous error bounds as well as an efficient preconditioning strategy to deal with the large-scale case. We show in various examples that the method performs very robustly. Copyright © 2021, Kent State University.