Paper detail

On Weak Topology for Optimal Control of Switched Nonlinear Systems

Optimal control of switched systems is challenging due to the discrete nature of the switching control input. The embedding-based approach addresses this challenge by solving a corresponding relaxed optimal control problem with only continuous inputs, and then projecting the relaxed solution back to obtain the optimal switching solution of the original problem. This paper presents a novel idea that views the embedding-based approach as a change of topology over the optimization space, resulting in a general procedure to construct a switched optimal control algorithm with guaranteed convergence to a local optimizer. Our result provides a unified topology based framework for the analysis and design of various embedding-based algorithms in solving the switched optimal control problem and includes many existing methods as special cases.