Evolutionary Algorithms for Approximate Optimal Control of the Heat Equation with Thermal Sources

In this paper, optimal control problem (OCP) governed by the heat equation with thermal sources is considered. The aim is to find an optimal control which puts the system in a finite time T, into a stationary regime and to minimize a general objective function. To obtain an approximate solution of this problem, a partition of the time‐control space is considered and the discrete form of the problem is converted to a quasi assignment problem. Then by using an evolutionary algorithm, an approximate optimal control function is obtained as a piecewise linear function. Numerical examples are given to show the proficiency of the presented algorithm.