Optimal Control of Semilinear Elliptic Partial Differential Equations with Non-Lipschitzian Nonlinearities

Abstract: We study optimal control problems that are governed by semilinear elliptic partial differential equations that involve non-Lipschitzian nonlinearities. It is shown that, for a certain class of such PDEs, the solution map is Fr\'{e}chet differentiable even though the differential operator contains a nondifferentiable term. We exploit this effect to establish first-order necessary optimality conditions for minimizers of the considered control problems. The resulting KKT-conditions take the form of coupled PDE-systems that are posed in non-Muckenhoupt weighted Sobolev spaces and raise interesting questions regarding the regularity of optimal controls, the derivation of second-order optimality conditions, and the analysis of finite element discretizations.