Symplectic Runge-Kutta discretization of a regularized forward-backward sweep iteration for optimal control problems

Abstract

Li, Chen, Tai & E. (J. Machine Learning Research, 2018) have proposed a regularization of the forward-backward sweep iteration for solving the Pontryagin maximum principle in optimal control problems. The authors prove the global convergence of the iteration in the continuous time case. In this article we show that their proof can be extended to the case of numerical discretization by symplectic Runge-Kutta pairs. We demonstrate the convergence with a simple numerical experiment.