The first introductory chapter addresses a handful of representative OCPs and presents an overview of the associated mathematical issues. The rest of the book is organized into three parts: part I provides preliminary concepts of OCPs for algebraic and dynamical systems; part II addresses OCPs involving linear PDEs (mostly of elliptic and parabolic type) and quadratic cost functions; part III deals with more general classes of OCPs that stand behind the advanced applications mentioned above. weiterlesen