A Geometric Characterization of Viable Sets for Controlled Degenerate Diffusions

For a general controlled diffusion process and an arbitrary closed set K we study the viability, or weak invariance, or controlled invariance, of K, that is, the existence of a control for each initial point in K keeping the trajectory forever in K. By viscosity solutions methods we prove a simple necessary and sufficient condition involving only a deterministic second-order normal cone to K and the data of the diffusion process. We also give an extension to stochastic differential games.