JOURNAL OF OPTIMIZATION THEORY AND APPLICATIONS: VoL 27, No. 2, FEBRUARY 1979
TECHNICAL NOTE
On the Uniqueness of Nash Strategies for a Class of
Analytic Differential Games I
G. P. PAPAVASSILOPOULOS 2 AND J. B. CRUZ, JR. 3
Communicated by G. Leitmann
Abstract. The uniqueness of Nash equilibria is shown for the case
where the data of the problem are analytic functions and the admissible
strategy spaces are restricted to analytic functions of the current state
and time.
Key Words. Nash games, partial differential equations, differential
games.
1. Introduction
Nonzero-sum Nash differential games have attracted considerable
interest during the last few years. Despite the many results available in this
area, those concerning existence and uniqueness of optimal strategies are far
from being satisfactory. This holds true especially if the strategies take into
account information about the present and past values of the state of the
system. In this context, Refs. 1 and 2 can be pointed out. In these papers, the
nonuniqueness of the Nash equilibrium strategies was demonstrated when
the current state x (t) and the initial state x0 are available to at least one of the
1This work was supported in part by the Joint Services Electronics Program (US Army, US
Navy, and US Air Force) under Contract No, DAAB-07-72-C-0259, in part by the National
Science Foundation under Grant No. ENG-74-20091, and in part by the Department of
Energy, Electric Energy Systems Division under Contract No. US ERDA EX-76-C-01-
2088.
2 Graduate Student, Decision and Control Laboratory, Coordinated Science Laboratory,
and Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois.
3professor, Decision and Control Laboratory, Coordinated Science Laboratory, and
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois.
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0022-3239/79/0200-0309503.00/0 © I979 Plenum Publishing Corporation