Residual Minimisation for Transport-Based Optimal Control
Abstract
We consider an optimal control problem governed by a stationary linear transport equation in two or three spatial dimensions, motivated by photon transport in radiotherapy treatment planning. The control is an inflow boundary source, and the observation operator may track either the angular flux or its angular integral, the latter serving as a simplified dose surrogate. The associated optimality system consists of a transport--adjoint pair with angular dependence, coupled through a boundary optimality condition. We formulate a residual least-squares functional whose minimisers coincide with solutions of the Karush--Kuhn--Tucker system and show that the functional controls the L2 errors in the state and adjoint and the flux-weighted L2 error in the control. This yields a continuum-level a posteriori estimate without recourse to discretisation. An additional unweighted optimality residual certifies the control in the norm of the objective. The estimate holds for every admissible approximation and accounts for the different boundary measures in the control penalty and transport traces, without a positive lower bound on |ω· n|. We then parameterise the state, adjoint and control using neural networks and minimise over a neural network space using appropriate quadrature. The Monte Carlo formulation replaces each residual integral by a weighted sample mean, whose quadrature error enters the a posteriori estimate. We prove convergence under explicit assumptions on approximation, quadrature and optimisation and derive bounds on the total error in terms of approximation, quadrature and optimisation error. Numerical examples in two and three dimensions illustrate the residual--error relation and the flexibility of the residual framework for field- and dose-tracking control problems, including regular manufactured solutions.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{pryer2026residual,
title = {{Residual Minimisation for Transport-Based Optimal Control}},
author = {Tristan Pryer and Nikolaos Rekatsinas},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.02499},
eprint = {2610.02499},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02499},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Residual Minimisation for Transport-Based Optimal Control
AU - Tristan Pryer
AU - Nikolaos Rekatsinas
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/12
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.02499
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02499
AB - We consider an optimal control problem governed by a stationary linear transport equation in two or three spatial dimensions, motivated by photon transport in radiotherapy treatment planning. The control is an inflow boundary source, and the observation operator may track either the angular flux or its angular integral, the latter serving as a simplified dose surrogate. The associated optimality system consists of a transport--adjoint pair with angular dependence, coupled through a boundary optimality condition. We formulate a residual least-squares functional whose minimisers coincide with solutions of the Karush--Kuhn--Tucker system and show that the functional controls the L^2 errors in the state and adjoint and the flux-weighted L^2 error in the control. This yields a continuum-level a posteriori estimate without recourse to discretisation. An additional unweighted optimality residual certifies the control in the norm of the objective. The estimate holds for every admissible approximation and accounts for the different boundary measures in the control penalty and transport traces, without a positive lower bound on |ω· n|. We then parameterise the state, adjoint and control using neural networks and minimise over a neural network space using appropriate quadrature. The Monte Carlo formulation replaces each residual integral by a weighted sample mean, whose quadrature error enters the a posteriori estimate. We prove convergence under explicit assumptions on approximation, quadrature and optimisation and derive bounds on the total error in terms of approximation, quadrature and optimisation error. Numerical examples in two and three dimensions illustrate the residual--error relation and the flexibility of the residual framework for field- and dose-tracking control problems, including regular manufactured solutions.
ER -