Optimal distributed control of a diffuse interface model of tumor growth

Abstract

In this paper, a distributed optimal control problem is studied for a diffuse interface model of tumor growth which was proposed in [A. Hawkins-Daruud, K.G. van der Zee, J.T. Oden, Numerical simulation of a thermodynamically consistent four-species tumor growth model, Int. J. Numer. Math. Biomed. Engng. 28 (2011), 3-24]. The model consists of a Cahn-Hilliard equation for the tumor cell fraction coupled to a reaction-diffusion equation for a variable representing the nutrient-rich extracellular water volume fraction. The distributed control monitors as a right-hand side the reaction-diffusion equation and can be interpreted as a nutrient supply or a medication, while the cost function, which is of standard tracking type, is meant to keep the tumor cell fraction under control during the evolution. We show that the control-to-state operator is Frechet differentiable between appropriate Banach spaces and derive the first-order necessary optimality conditions in terms of a variational inequality involving the adjoint state variables.

A revised version of the paper has been published on Nonlinearity 30 (2017), 2518-2546. Let us point out that in this arXiv:1601.04567 [math.AP] version there is something missing in assumption (H3) at page 6: the first initial value in (H6) must also satisfy a Neumann homogeneous condition at the boundary of the domain