Optimal Control of Stochastic Partial Differential Equations with Partial Observations: Stochastic Maximum Principles and Numerical Approximation

This work establishes a general stochastic maximum principle for partially observed optimal control of semi-linear stochastic partial differential equations in a nonconvex control domain. The state evolves in a Hilbert space driven by a cylindrical Wiener process and finitely many Brownian motions, while observations are in an Euclidean space having correlated noise. For convex control domain and diffusion coefficients in the state being control-independent, numerical algorithms are developed to solve the partially observed optimal control problems using stochastic gradient descent algorithm combined with finite element approximations and the branching filtering algorithm. Numerical experiments are conducted for demonstration.