Optimal control of self-adjoint nonlinear operator equations in Hilbert spaces

In this paper, we formulate and study a general optimal control problem governed by nonlinear operator equations described by unbounded self-adjoint operators in Hilbert spaces. This problem extends various particular control models studied in the literature, while it has not been considered before in such a generality. We develop an efficient way to construct a finite-dimensional subspace extension of the given self-adjoint operator that allows us to design the corresponding adjoint system and finally derive an appropriate counterpart of the Pontryagin Maximum Principle for the constrained optimal control problem under consideration by using the obtained increment formula for the cost functional and needle type variations of optimal controls.