Optimal control of a bioreactor for biofuel production

Abstract: Dynamic flux balance analysis of a bioreactor is based on the coupling between a dynamic problem, which models the evolution of biomass, feeding substrates and metabolites, and a linear program, which encodes the metabolic activity inside cells. We cast the problem in the language of optimal control and propose a hybrid formulation to model the full coupling between macroscopic and microscopic level. On a given location of the hybrid system we analyze necessary conditions given by the Pontryagin Maximum Principle and discuss the presence of singular arcs. In particular, for the single-input case we prove that optimal controls are bang-bang. For the multi-input case, under suitable assumptions, we prove that generically with respect to initial conditions optimal controls are bang-bang.