The development of efficient artificial nanodevices poses challenges which are of fundamental and technological nature. Recent progress has been made in the context of finite-time thermodynamics. A central question in finite-time thermodynamics is to identify the optimal procedure to extract the greatest amount of work from a system operating under well-defined constraints. For externally controlled small systems, the optimal driving protocol maximizes the mean work spend in a finite-time transition between two given system states under the constraints of given initial and final energy values, and a fixed total operation time. For simplicity we consider an externally controlled single level system, which is embedded in a thermal environment and coupled to a particle reservoir. The optimal protocols are calculated from a master equation approach for different system-reservoir couplings. For open systems, the system-reservoir couplings are shown to have a striking influence on the optimal driving setup. We point out that the optimal protocols have discontinuous jumps at the initial and final times. Finally, this work provides a first attempt to extend these calculations to larger system sizes.
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