Preserving general physical properties in model reduction of dynamical systems via constrained-optimization projection

Model-reduction techniques aim to reduce the computational complexity of simulating dynamical systems by applying a (Petrov-)Galerkin projection process that enforces the dynamics to evolve in a low-dimensional subspace of the original state space. Frequently, the resulting reduced-order model (ROM) violates intrinsic physical properties of the original full-order model (FOM) (e.g., global conservation, Lagrangian structure, state-variable bounds) because the projection process does not generally ensure preservation of these properties. However, in many applications, ensuring the ROM preserves such intrinsic properties can enable the ROM to retain physical meaning and lead to improved accuracy and stability properties. In this work, we present a general constrained-optimization formulation for projection-based model reduction that can be used as a template to enforce the ROM to satisfy specific properties on the kinematics and dynamics. We introduce constrained-optimization formulations at both the time-continuous (i.e., ODE) level, which leads to a constrained Galerkin projection, and at the time-discrete level, which leads to a least-squares Petrov-Galerkin (LSPG) projection, in the context of linear multistep schemes. We demonstrate the ability of the proposed formulations to equip ROMs with desired properties such as global energy conservation and bounds on the total variation.