Int. J. Dynam. Control DOI 10.1007/s40435-017-0315-9 On the output controllability of a class of discrete nonlinear distributed systems: a fixed point theorem approach Mustapha Lhous 1 · Mostafa Rachik 2 · Jamal Bouyaghroumni 2 · Abdessamad Tridane 3 Received: 30 April 2016 / Revised: 8 February 2017 / Accepted: 8 March 2017 © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2017 Abstract Given a desired signal y d = ( y d i ) i ∈{0,..., N } , we investigate the optimal control, which applied to nonlinear discrete distributed system x i +1 = Ax i + Ex i + Bu i , to give a desired output y d . Techniques based on the fixed point theorems for solving this problem are presented. An example and numerical simulation is also given. Keywords Output controllability · Optimal control · Nonlinear system · Fixed point theorem 1 Introduction The research devoted the controllability was started in the 1960s by Kalman and refers to linear dynamical systems. Because the most of practical dynamical systems are non- linear, that’s why, in recent years various controllability problems for different types of nonlinear or semilinear dynamical systems have been considered [19]. There are large type of controllability such as completely controllability, small controllability, local controllability, regional controllability, near controllabilitry, null controlla- bility and output controllability [46, 814]. B Mustapha Lhous mlhous17@gmail.com 1 Laboratory of Modeling, Analysis, Control and Statistics, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Faculty of Sciences Ain Chock, Hassan II University of Casablanca, 5366 Maarif, Casablanca, Morocco 2 Laboratory of Analysis Modelling and Simulation, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Faculty of Sciences Ben M’sik, Hassan II University of Casablanca, 7955 Sidi Othman, Casablanca, Morocco 3 Department of Mathematical Sciences, United Arab Emirates University, P.O. Box 15551, Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates In the present paper we investigate the output controlla- bility of a class of nonlinear infinite-dimensional discrete systems. More precisely, we consider the nonlinear system whose state is described by the following difference equa- tion ( S) x i +1 = Ax i + Ex i + Bu i , i ∈{0,..., N 1}, x 0 , the corresponding output signal is y i = Cx i , i ∈{0,..., N }. The operator A : X −→ X is supposed to be bounded on the Hilbert space X (the state space), E : X −→ X is a nonlinear operator, B L(U, X ) and C L( X , Y ) where the Hilbert space U is the input space and the Hilbert space Y is the output one. Given a desired output y d = ( y d i ) i ∈{1,..., N } , we investigate the optimal control u = (u i ) i ∈{0,1,..., N 1} which minimizes the functional cost J (u ) = u 2 over all controls satisfying Cx i = y d i , i ∈{1,..., N }. To solve this problem and inspired by what was done in [15, 16] we use, in the first part, a state space technique to show that the problem of input retrieval can be seen as a problem of optimal control with constraints on the final state [17]. In the second part, we use a technique based on the fixed point theorem (see [2, 3, 7, 1821]). We establish that the set of admissible controls is completely characterized by 123