Nonlocal optimal design: A new perspective about the approximation of solutions in optimal design

It is well-known from the recent literature that nonlocal integral models are suitable to approximate integral functionals or partial differential equations. In the present work, a nonlocal optimal design model has been considered as approximation of the corresponding classical or local optimal control problem. The new model is driven by a nonlocal elliptic equation and the cost functional belongs to a broad class of nonlocal functional integrals. The purpose of this paper is to prove existence of optimal design for the new model. This work is complemented by showing that the limit of the nonlocal problem is the local one when the cost to minimize is the compliance functional (see [14]).