SOLVABILITY OF FORWARD-BACKWARD SDES AND THE NODAL SET OF HAMILTON-JACOBI-BELLMAN EQUATIONS

The solvability of a class of forward-backward stochastic differential equations (SDEs for short) over an arbitrarily prescribed time duration is studied. The authors design a stochastic relaxed control problem, with both drift and difftusion all being controlled, so that the solvability problem is converted to a problem of finding the nodal set of the viscosity solution to a certain Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. This method overcomes the fatal difficulty encountered in the traditional contraction mapping approach to the existence theorem of such SDEs.