Abstract. The aim of the paper is to describe the main critical cases in the theory of singularly perturbed optimal control problems and to give examples which are typical for slow/fast systems. The theory has traditionally dealt only with perturbation problems near normally hyperbolic manifold of singularities and this manifold is supposed to isolated. We reduce the original singularly perturbed problem to a regularized one such that the existence of slow integral manifolds can be established by means of the standard theory. We illustrate our approach by several examples of control problems.Keywords: integral manifolds, singular perturbations, optimal control Citation: Sobolev VA. Critical cases in slow/fast control problems.