ANALYSIS OF THE VANISHING DISCOUNT LIMIT FOR OPTIMAL CONTROL PROBLEMS IN CONTINUOUS AND DISCRETE TIME

A classical problem in ergodic continuous time control consists of studying the limit behavior of the optimal value of a discounted cost functional with infinite horizon as the discount factor λ tends to zero. In the literature, this problem has been addressed under various controllability or ergodicity conditions ensuring that the rescaled value function converges uni-formly to a constant limit. In this case the limit can be characterized as the unique constant such that a suitable Hamilton-Jacobi equation has at least one continuous viscosity solution. In this paper, we study this problem without such conditions, so that the aforementioned limit needs not be constant. Our main result characterizes the uniform limit (when it exists) as the maximal subsolution of a system of Hamilton-Jacobi equations. Moreover, when such a subsolution is a viscosity solution, we obtain the convergence of optimal values as well as a rate of convergence. This mirrors the analysis of the discrete time case, where we characterize the uniform limit as the supremum over a set of sub-invariant half-lines of the dynamic programming operator. The emerging structure in both discrete and continuous time models shows that the supremum over sub-invariant half-lines with respect to the Lax-Oleinik semigroup/dynamic programming operator, captures the behavior of the limit cost as discount vanishes.