Free time optimal control problems with time delays

International audienceSolutions to optimal control problems for retarded systems, on a fixed time interval, satisfy a form of the Maximum Principle, in which the co-state equation is an advanced differential equation. In this paper we present an extension of this well-known necessary condition of optimality, to cover situations in which the data is non-smooth, and the final time is free. The fact that the end-time is a choice variable is accommodated by an extra transversality condition. A traditional approach to deriving this extra condition is to reduce the free end-time problem to a fixed end-time problem by a parameterized change of the time variable. This approach is problematic for time delay problems because it introduces a parameter dependent time-delay that is not readily amenable to analysis; to avoid this difficulty we instead base our analysis on direct perturbation of the end-time. Formulae are derived for the gradient of the minimum cost as a function of the end-time. It is shown how these formulae can be exploited to construct two-stage algorithms for the computation of solutions to optimal retarded control problems with free-time, in which a sequence of fixed time problems are solved by means of Guinn's transformation, and the end-time is adjusted according to a rule based on the earlier derived gradient formulae for the minimum cost function. Numerical examples are presented