SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, Vol.35, No.4, 1204-1216, 1997
An Abstract Bang-Bang Principle and Time-Optimal Boundary Control of the Heat-Equation
A principal technical result of this paper is that the one-dimensional heat equation with boundary control is exactly null-controllable with control restricted to an arbitrary set epsilon subset of [0, T] of positive measure, A general abstract argument is presented to show that, in contrast to previous results, this implies the bang-bang property ibr time-optimal controls - i.e., such a control can take only extreme values of (the hull of) the constraint set - without imposing any condition regarding the target state.