# Solving Optimal Control Problems with Universal Differential Equations

Here we will solve a classic optimal control problem with a universal differential equation. Let

$$$x^{′′} = u^3(t)$$$

where we want to optimize our controller u(t) such that the following is minimized:

$$$L(\theta) = \sum_i \Vert 4 - x(t_i) \Vert + 2 \Vert x^\prime(t_i) \Vert + \Vert u(t_i) \Vert$$$

where $i$ is measured on (0,8) at 0.01 intervals. To do this, we rewrite the ODE in first order form:

\begin{aligned} x^\prime &= v \\ v^′ &= u^3(t) \\ \end{aligned}

and thus

$$$L(\theta) = \sum_i \Vert 4 - x(t_i) \Vert + 2 \Vert v(t_i) \Vert + \Vert u(t_i) \Vert$$$

is our loss function on the first order system. We thus choose a neural network form for $u$ and optimize the equation with respect to this loss. Note that we will first reduce control cost (the last term) by 10x in order to bump the network out of a local minimum. This looks like:

using DiffEqFlux, DifferentialEquations, Plots, Statistics
tspan = (0.0f0,8.0f0)
ann = FastChain(FastDense(1,32,tanh), FastDense(32,32,tanh), FastDense(32,1))
θ = initial_params(ann)
function dxdt_(dx,x,p,t)
x1, x2 = x
dx[1] = x[2]
dx[2] = ann([t],p)[1]^3
end
x0 = [-4f0,0f0]
ts = Float32.(collect(0.0:0.01:tspan[2]))
prob = ODEProblem(dxdt_,x0,tspan,θ)
solve(prob,Vern9(),abstol=1e-10,reltol=1e-10)
end
mean(abs2,4.0 .- x[1,:]) + 2mean(abs2,x[2,:]) + mean(abs2,[first(ann([t],θ)) for t in ts])/10
end
cb = function (θ,l)
println(l)
p = plot(solve(remake(prob,p=θ),Tsit5(),saveat=0.01),ylim=(-6,6),lw=3)
plot!(p,ts,[first(ann([t],θ)) for t in ts],label="u(t)",lw=3)
display(p)
return false
end
# Display the ODE with the current parameter values.
cb(θ,l)
res1 = DiffEqFlux.sciml_train(loss_adjoint, θ, ADAM(0.005), cb = cb,maxiters=100)
res2 = DiffEqFlux.sciml_train(loss_adjoint, res1.u,
BFGS(initial_stepnorm=0.01), cb = cb,maxiters=100,
allow_f_increases = false)

Now that the system is in a better behaved part of parameter space, we return to the original loss function to finish the optimization:

function loss_adjoint(θ)
savefig("optimal_control.png")