Boundary controllability for conservative PDEs

Boundary observability and controllability problems for evolution equations governed by PDEs have been greatly studied in the past years. However, the problems were studied on a case-by-case basis, only for some particular types of boundary controls, and, moreover, several unnatural restrictions concerning lower-order terms were used.Our goal here is to give a general approach for boundary controllability problems, which is valid for all evolution PDEs of hyperbolic or ultrahyperbolic type, all boundary controls for which the corresponding homogeneous problem is well-posed, and all well-posedness spaces for the homogeneous problem. The first example of such equations is the class of hyperbolic equations, but valid examples are also equations such as the Schroedinger equation and various models for the plate equation.This work is essentially based on some apriori estimates of Carleman's type obtained by the author in a previous paper [29].This research was partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant NSF-DMS-8903747.