The international Conference on Optimal Control of Coupled Systems of Partial Differential Equations was held at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Ober- wolfach (www.mfo.de) from April, 17 to 23, 2005. The scientific program included 30 talks covering various topics as controllability, feedback-control, optimality sys- tems, model-reduction techniques, analysis and optimal control of flow problems and fluid-structure interactions, as well as problems of shape and topology opti- mization. The applications discussed during the conference range from the opti- mization and control of quantum mechanical systems, the design of piezo-electric acoustic micro-mechanical devices, optimal control of crystal growth, the control of bodies immersed into a fluid to airfoil design and much more. Thus the appli- cations are across all time and length scales.
Optimization and control of systems governed by partial differential equa- tions and more recently by variational inequalities is a very active field of research in Applied Mathematics, in particular in numerical analysis, scientific comput- ing and optimization. In order to able to handle real-world applications, scalable and parallelizable algorithms have to be designed, implemented and validated. This requires an in-depth understanding of both the theoretical properties and the numerical realization of such structural insights. Therefore, a ‘core’ develop- ment within the field of optimization with PDE-constraints such as the analysis of control-and-state-constrained problems, the role of obstacles, multi-phases etc. and an interdisciplinary ‘diagonal’ bridging regarding applications and numerical simulation are most important.