Control of a Korteweg-de Vries equation: a tutorial

(Communicated by Olivier Glass) Abstract. These notes are intended to be a tutorial material revisiting in an almost self-contained way, some control results for the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation posed on a bounded interval. We address the topics of bound-ary controllability and internal stabilization for this nonlinear control system. Concerning controllability, homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions are considered and a control is put on the Neumann boundary condition at the right end-point of the interval. We show the existence of some critical domains for which the linear KdV equation is not controllable. In despite of that, we prove that in these cases the nonlinearity gives the exact controllability. Re-garding stabilization, we study the problem where all the boundary conditions are homogeneous. We add an internal damping mechanism in order to force the solutions of the KdV equation to decay exponentially to the origin in L2-norm. 1. Introduction. In 1834 John Scott Russell, a Scottish naval engineer, was ob-serving the Union Canal in Scotland when he unexpectedly witnessed a very specia