Maximum Principle of Optimal Stochastic Control with Terminal State Constraint and Its Application in Finance

This paper considers the optimal control problem for a general stochastic system with general terminal state constraint. Both the drift and the diffusion coefficients can contain the control variable and the state constraint here is of non-functional type. The author puts forward two ways to understand the target set and the variation set. Then under two kinds of finite-codimensional conditions, the stochastic maximum principles are established, respectively. The main results are proved in two different ways. For the former, separating hyperplane method is used; for the latter, Ekeland’s variational principle is applied. At last, the author takes the mean-variance portfolio selection with the box-constraint on strategies as an example to show the application in finance.