The authors present a model of heat conduction using the Caputo fractional derivative with respect to time. The presented model was used to reconstruct the thermal conductivity coefficient, heat transfer coefficient, initial condition and order of fractional derivative in the fractional heat conduction inverse problem. Additional information for the inverse problem was the temperature measurements obtained from porous aluminum. In this paper, the authors used a finite difference method to solve direct problems and the Real Ant Colony Optimization algorithm to find a minimum of certain functional (solve the inverse problem). Finally, the authors present the temperature values computed from the model and compare them with the measured data from real objects.

The article focuses on the presentation and comparison of selected heuristic algorithms for solving the inverse problem for the anomalous diffusion model. Considered mathematical model consists of time-space fractional diffusion equation with initial boundary conditions. Those kind of models are used in modelling the phenomena of heat flow in porous materials. In the model, Caputo’s and Riemann-Liouville’s fractional derivatives were used. The inverse problem was based on identifying orders of the derivatives and recreating fractional boundary condition. Taking into consideration the fact that inverse problems of this kind are ill-conditioned, the problem should be considered as hard to solve. Therefore,to solve it, metaheuristic optimization algorithms popular in scientific literature were used and their performance were compared: Group Teaching Optimization Algorithm (GTOA), Equilibrium Optimizer (EO), Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO), War Strategy Optimizer (WSO), Tuna Swarm Optimization (TSO), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Jellyfish Search (JS) and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC). This paper presents computational examples showing effectiveness of considered metaheuristic optimization algorithms in solving inverse problem for anomalous diffusion model.

This paper presents the algorithms for solving the inverse problems on models with the fractional derivative. The presented algorithm is based on the Real Ant Colony Optimization algorithm. In this paper, the examples of the algorithm application for the inverse heat conduction problem on the model with the fractional derivative of the Caputo type is also presented. Based on those examples, the authors are comparing the proposed algorithm with the iteration method presented in the paper: Zhang, Z. An undetermined coefficient problem for a fractional diffusion equation. Inverse Probl. 2016, 32.