Abstract: | We introduce the tensor numerical method for solving optimal control problems that are constrained by fractional two- (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) elliptic operators with variable coefficients. We solve the governing equation for the control function which includes a sum of the fractional operator and its inverse, both discretized over large 3D spacial grids. Using the diagonalization of the arising matrix-valued functions in the eigenbasis of the one-dimensional Sturm–Liouville operators, we construct the rank-structured tensor approximation with controllable precision for the discretized fractional elliptic operators and the respective preconditioner. The right-hand side in the constraining equation (the optimal design function) is supposed to be represented in a form of a low-rank canonical tensor. Then the equation for the control function is solved in a tensor structured format by using preconditioned CG iteration with the adaptive rank truncation procedure that also ensures the accuracy of calculations, given an -threshold. This method reduces the numerical cost for solving the control problem to (plus the quadratic term with a small weight), which outperforms traditional approaches with complexity in the 3D case. The storage for the representation of all 3D nonlocal operators and functions involved is also estimated by . This essentially outperforms the traditional methods operating with fully populated matrices and vectors in . Numerical tests for 2D/3D control problems indicate the almost linear complexity scaling of the rank truncated preconditioned conjugate gradient iteration in the univariate grid size n. |