Optimal Control of Quasistatic Plasticity with Linear Kinematic Hardening Part I: Existence and Discretization in Time

In this paper we consider an optimal control problem governed by a time-dependent variational inequality arising in quasistatic plasticity with linear kinematic hardening. We address certain continuity properties of the forward operator, which imply the existence of an optimal control. Moreover, a discretization in time is derived and we show that every local minimizer of the continuous problem can be approximated by minimizers of modified, time-discrete problems.