Optimal Control of a Parabolic Distributed Parameter System Using a Barycentric Shifted Gegenbauer Pseudospectral Method

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel pseudospectral method for the numerical solution of optimal control problems governed by a parabolic distributed parameter system. The infinite-dimensional optimal control problem is reduced into a finite-dimensional nonlinear programming problem through shifted Gegenbauer quadratures constructed using a stable barycentric representation of Lagrange interpolating polynomials and explicit barycentric weights for the shifted Gegenbauer-Gauss (SGG) points. A rigorous error analysis of the method is presented, and a numerical test example is given to show the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed pseudospectral method.