A FE-ADMM algorithm for Lavrentiev-regularized state-constrained elliptic control problem^★

School of Mathematical Sciences, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, Liaoning 116025, China.

^* Corresponding author: yubo@dlut.edu.cn

Received: 3 June 2017
Accepted: 12 March 2018

Abstract

In this paper, Elliptic control problems with pointwise box constraints on the state is considered, where the corresponding Lagrange multipliers in general only represent regular Borel measure functions. To tackle this difficulty, the Lavrentiev regularization is employed to deal with the state constraints. To numerically discretize the resulted problem, full piecewise linear finite element discretization is employed. Estimation of the error produced by regularization and discretization is done. The error order of full discretization is not inferior to that of variational discretization because of the Lavrentiev-regularization. Taking the discretization error into account, algorithms of high precision do not make much sense. Utilizing efficient first-order algorithms to solve discretized problems to moderate accuracy is sufficient. Then a heterogeneous alternating direction method of multipliers (hADMM) is proposed. Different from the classical ADMM, our hADMM adopts two different weighted norms in two subproblems respectively. Additionally, to get more accurate solution, a two-phase strategy is presented, in which the primal-dual active set (PDAS) method is used as a postprocessor of the hADMM. Numerical results not only verify error estimates but also show the efficiency of the hADMM and the two-phase strategy.