Caratheodory-Equivalence, Noether Theorems, and Tonelli Full-Regularity in the Calculus of Variations and Optimal Control

Abstract

We study, in a unified way, the following questions related to the properties of Pontryagin extremals for optimal control problems with unrestricted controls: i) How the transformations, which define the equivalence of two problems, transform the extremals? ii) How to obtain quantities which are conserved along any extremal? iii) How to assure that the set of extremals include the minimizers predicted by the existence theory? These questions are connected to: i) the Caratheodory method which establishes a correspondence between the minimizing curves of equivalent problems; ii) the interplay between the concept of invariance and the theory of optimality conditions in optimal control, which are the concern of the theorems of Noether; iii) regularity conditions for the minimizers and the work pioneered by Tonelli.