Time optimal control for a reaction diffusion system arising in cardiac electrophysiology – a monolithic approach

Motivated by the termination of undesirable arrhythmia, a time optimal control formulation for the monodomain equations is proposed. It is shown that, under certain conditions, the optimal solutions of this problem steer the system into an appropriate stable neighborhood of the resting state. Towards this goal, some new regularity results and asymptotic properties for the monodomain equations with the Rogers−McCulloch ionic model are obtained. For the numerical realization, a monolithic approach, which simultaneously optimizes for the optimal times and optimal controls, is presented and analyzed. Its practical realization is based on a semismooth Newton method. Numerical examples and comparisons are included