“…Using the direct method of the Calculus of Variations, we show in Section 4 that the optimal control problem (1)-(4) has a nonempty set of solutions provided the admissible controls A(x) are uniformly bounded in BV -norm, in spite of the fact that the corresponding quasilinear differential operator −div |(A∇y, ∇y) R N | p−2 2 A∇y , in principle, has degeneracies as |A 1 2 ∇y| tends to zero [1]. Moreover, when the term |(A∇y, ∇y) R N | p− 2 2 is regarded as the coefficient of the Laplace operator, we have the case of unbounded coefficients (see [12,14]). In order to avoid degeneracy with respect to the control A(x), we assume that matrix A(x) has a uniformly bounded spectrum away from zero.…”