Online Spectral Deflation for State Constrained Optimal Control Problems

Abstract

Parametric PDE-constrained optimal control with pointwise state constraints requires repeated solution of restricted Schur-complement systems on parameter-dependent inactive sets. In a primal active-set method, each inactive-set system is symmetric positive definite, but the active set can change nonsmoothly with the parameter. The resulting operator may vary in dimension, sparsity pattern, and spectrum, limiting reuse of sparse factorizations, multigrid hierarchies, and Krylov information. We propose a reusable spectral-deflation strategy anchored to one full-domain reference Schur complement. Low reference eigenmodes are computed once, restricted online to each inactive set, and used as an A-DEF2 deflation basis for Jacobi-preconditioned CG. The framework also supports POD enrichment, Rayleigh-Ritz reselection, coarse-grid or analytical reference modes, and conditioning safeguards. Given the active set, the method preserves the high-fidelity inactive-set system and solves it to the prescribed CG tolerance; it accelerates the linear algebra rather than replacing the optimal-control solve with a surrogate. We explain the method through a spectral-coherence view, motivated by interlacing and perturbation arguments and assessed with principal-angle diagnostics. Across diffusion, convection-diffusion, nonlinear thermal, and conjugate-heat-transfer benchmarks, deflation reduces CG iterations by about 55 to 98 percent. GPU deployments also show wall-time gains over CPU sparse-direct and algebraic-multigrid baselines, because the reference basis is built once whereas competing solver structures are rebuilt per instance. Coarse-grid or analytical modes amortize the offline cost within a single parameter sweep; fine-grid eigensolves remain more precompute-limited. Timings isolate the inactive-set linear-solve kernel; reducing the active-set outer loop is outside the present scope.