An optimal control problem is considered to find a stable surface traction, which minimizes the discrepancy between a given displacement field and its estimation. Firstly, the inverse elastic problem is constructed by variational inequalities, and a stable approximation of surface traction is obtained with Tikhonov regularization. Then a finite element discretization of the inverse elastic problem is analyzed. Moreover, the error estimation of the numerical solutions is deduced. Finally, a numerical algorithm is detailed and three examples in two-dimensional case illustrate the efficiency of the algorithm.
