Controlling conservation laws I: entropy-entropy flux

Abstract: We study a class of variational problems for regularized conservation laws with Lax's entropy-entropy flux pairs. We first introduce a modified optimal transport space based on conservation laws with diffusion. Using this space, we demonstrate that conservation laws with diffusion are "flux--gradient flows". We next construct variational problems for these flows, for which we derive dual PDE systems for regularized conservation laws. Several examples, including traffic flow and Burgers' equation, are presented. Incorporating both primal-dual algorithms and monotone schemes, we successfully compute the control of conservation laws.