A deep quench approach to the optimal control of an Allen–Cahn equation with dynamic boundary conditions and double obstacles

In this paper, we investigate optimal control problems for Allen-Cahn variational inequalities with a dynamic boundary condition involving double obstacle potentials and the LaplaceBeltrami operator. The approach covers both the cases of distributed controls and of boundary controls. The cost functional is of standard tracking type, and box constraints for the controls are prescribed. We prove existence of optimal controls and derive firstorder necessary conditions of optimality. The general strategy is the following: we use the results that were recently established by two of the authors in the paper [5] for the case of (differentiable) logarithmic potentials and perform a so-called “deep quench limit”. Using compactness and monotonicity arguments, it is shown that this strategy leads to the desired first-order necessary optimality conditions for the case of (non-differentiable) double obstacle potentials.