The International Workshop on Some Selected Problems in Optimization and Control Theory has started on February 4, 2015 at Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics (VIASM). This activity is jointly sponsored and organized by VIASM and Institute of Mathematics, VAST.

Control Theory, with the famous achievements at its beginning like the Pontriagin Maximum Principle, the Bellman Dynamic Programming Principle, allows one to define and compute optimal trajectories of space crafts, develop robotics. It has many other applications in engineering sciences, economics. For instance, one can apply the theory to find an optimal growth of an economy.

According to Professor Nguyen Dong Yen – Chair of the Workshop, research in Optimization and Control Theory is a central research direction of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (called briefly SIASM). This Society publishes several important journals: SIOPT, SJOC, and so on.

Qualitative aspects of Optimization and Control Theory involve optimality conditions, solution existence, properties of the solution sets, duality theory, solution stability and sensitivity, behavior of the optimal value functions, robustness, problems under uncertainty,… Investigations on nonsmooth problems, models described by multifunctions, vector problems (i.e. optimization problems with vector objective functions), problems described by PDEs, all are going on lively.

Quantitative studies in Optimization and Control Theory yield solution methods, software packages. Here interesting theoretical questions appear, for instance, the convergence and speed of convergence of the solution algorithms.

Therefore, many challenges in Optimization and Control Theory are waiting for new generations of researchers.

Is this workshop has any history?

The Worshop can be a continuation in a quite new form of the 8 Korea-Vietnam and Vietnam-Korea Seminars/Workshops on Optimization Theory: 4 in Korea, 4 in Vietnam. The first was organized by Professors Do Sang Kim and Gue Myung Lee in Busan (Pusan) in February 1998. The last one was organized by Professors Pham Huu Sach, Vu Ngoc Phat, and other Vietnamese colleagues in Dalat in December 2011.

Thank you all the professors for making this happens again at VIASM.

Wish this Workshop great success!