On optimal control of free boundary problems of obstacle type

Abstract: A numerical study of an optimal control formulation for a shape optimization problem governed by an elliptic variational inequality is performed. The shape optimization problem is reformulated as a boundary control problem in a fixed domain. The discretized optimal control problem is a non-smooth and non-convex mathematical programing problem. The performance of the standard BFGS quasi-Newton method and the BFGS method with the inexact line search are tested.