Boundary control of some distributed heterogeneous vibrating system with given states at intermediate time instants

This paper considers the boundary control problem for a distributed heterogeneous vibrating system described by a one-dimensional wave equation with piecewise constant characteristics. The travel time of a wave through each homogeneous section is assumed the same. The control is implemented by displacement at the two ends. A constructive control design approach is proposed to transfer the vibrations on a given time interval from the initial state through the multipoint intermediate states to the terminal state. The control design scheme is as follows: the original problem is reduced to a control problem with distributed actions and zero boundary conditions. Then the variable separation method and control methods for finite-dimensional systems with multipoint intermediate conditions are used. The results are illustrated by an example.