Journal ArticleSpike Variations for Stochastic Volterra Integral EquationsWang, Tianxiao; Yong, JiongminThe spike variation technique plays a crucial role in deriving Pontryagin's type maximum principle of optimal controls for ordinary differential equations (ODEs), partial differential equations (PDEs), stochastic differential equations (SDEs), and (deterministic forward) Volterra integral equations (FVIEs), when the control domains are not assumed to be convex. It is natural to expect that such a technique could be extended to the case of (forward) stochastic Volterra integral equations (FSVIEs). However, by mimicking the case of SDEs, one encounters an essential difficulty of handling an involved quadratic term. To overcome this difficulty, we introduce an auxiliary process for which one can use It\^o's formula, and develop new technologies inspired by stochastic linear-quadratic optimal control problems. Then the suitable representation of the above-mentioned quadratic form is obtained, and the second-order adjoint equations are derived. Consequently, the maximum principle of Pontryagin type is established. Some relevant extensions are investigated as well.SIAM2023-12-3110499994SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization6163608 to 36340363-0129https://doi.org/10.1137/22M15220972305475National Science Foundation