This book is devoted to fully developing and comparing the two main
approaches to the numerical approximation of controls for wave
propagation phenomena: the continuous and the discrete. This is
accomplished in the abstract functional setting of conservative
semigroups.The main results of the work unify, to a large extent, these
two approaches, which yield similaralgorithms and convergence rates. The
discrete approach, however, gives not only efficient numerical
approximations of the continuous controls, but also ensures some partial
controllability properties of the finite-dimensional approximated
dynamics. Moreover, it has the advantage of leading to iterative
approximation processes that converge without a limiting threshold in
the number of iterations. Such a threshold, which is hard to compute and
estimate in practice, is a drawback of the methods emanating from the
continuous approach. To complement this theory, the book provides
convergence results for the discrete wave equation when discretized
using finite differences and proves the convergence of the discrete wave
equation with non-homogeneous Dirichlet conditions. The first book to
explore these topics in depth, On the Numerical Approximations of
Controls for Waves has rich applications to data assimilation problems
and will be of interest to researchers who deal with wave
approximations.