A minimisation problem in ${\mathrm{L}}^\infty$ with PDE and unilateral constraints

Abstract

We study the minimisation of a cost functional which measures the misfit on the boundary of a domain between a component of the solution to a certain parametric elliptic PDE system and a prediction of the values of this solution. We pose this problem as a PDE-constrained minimisation problem for a supremal cost functional in ${\mathrm{L}}^\infty$, where except for the PDE constraint there is also a unilateral constraint on the parameter. We utilise approximation by PDE-constrained minimisation problems in ${\mathrm{L}}^p$ as $p\to\infty$ and the generalised Kuhn-Tucker theory to derive the relevant variational inequalities in ${\mathrm{L}}^p$ and ${\mathrm{L}}^\infty$. These results are motivated by the mathematical modelling of the novel bio-medical imaging method of Fluorescent Optical Tomography.