Identifying initial condition in degenerate parabolic equation with singular potential (Q1656106)

Summary: A hybrid algorithm and a regularization method are proposed, for the first time, to solve the one-dimensional degenerate inverse heat conduction problem to estimate the initial temperature distribution from point measurements. The heat evolution is given by a degenerate parabolic equation with singular potential. This problem can be formulated in a least-squares framework, an iterative procedure which minimizes the difference between the given measurements and the value at sensor locations of a reconstructed field. The mathematical model leads to a nonconvex minimization problem. To solve it, we prove the existence of at least one solution of problem, and we propose two approaches: the first is based on a Tikhonov regularization, while the second approach is based on a hybrid genetic algorithm (married genetic with descent method type gradient). Some numerical experiments are given.