A variational method for the numerical simulation of a boundary controllability problem for the linear and semilinear 1D wave equations

We pursue the numerical implementation of a boundary controllability problem for the 1D wave equation based on a recent variational approach to deal with such situations that consists in analyzing an error functional defined for feasible functions complying with appropriate initial, boundary, and final constraints. The nature of such scheme, as a minimization process for a certain error functional, leads to a natural numerical implementation by using typical descent algorithms. Our aim here is to explore the basic ingredients to set up such practical numerical approximations which allow us to address linear and semilinear equations with the same numerical scheme.