  The effect of an externally applied force upon dynamics of dissipative
solitons is analyzed in the framework of the one-dimensional cubic-quintic
complex Ginzburg-Landau equation supplemented by a linear potential term. The
potential accounts for the external force manipulations and consists of three
symmetrically arranged potential wells whose depth is considered to be variable
along the longitudinal coordinate. It is found out that under an influence of
such potential a transition between different soliton waveforms coexisted under
the same physical conditions can be achieved. A low-dimensional phase-space
analysis is applied in order to demonstrate that by only changing the potential
profile, transitions between different soliton waveforms can be performed in a
controllable way. In particular, it is shown that by means of a selected
potential, propagating stationary dissipative soliton can be transformed into
another stationary solitons as well as into periodic, quasi-periodic, and
chaotic spatiotemporal dissipative structures.
