LP Modelling for the Time Optimal Control Problem of the Heat Equation

To find a control function which puts the heat equation in an unknown minimum time into a stationary regime is considered. Using an embedding method, the problem of finding the time optimal control is reduced to one consisting of minimizing a linear form over a set of positive measures. The resulting problem can be approximated by a finite dimensional linear programming (LP) problem. The nearly optimal control is constructed from the solution of the final LP problem. To find the lower bound of the optimal time a search algorithm is proposed. Some examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.