An integral-type constraint qualification to guarantee nondegeneracy of the maximum principle for optimal control problems with state constraints

Abstract

For optimal control problems involving ordinary differential equations and functional inequality state constraints, the maximum principle may degenerate, producing no useful information about minimizers. This is known as the degeneracy phenomenon. Several non-degenerate forms of the maximum principle, valid under different constraint qualifications, have been proposed in the literature. In this paper we propose a new constraint qualification under which a nondegenerate maximum principle is validated. In contrast with existing results, our constraint qualification is of an integral type. An advantage of the proposed constraint qualification is that it is verified on a larger class of problems with nonsmooth data and convex velocity sets.