Investigation of singular ordinary differential equations by a neuroevolutionary approach

Abstract

In this research, we have investigated doubly singular ordinary differential equations and a real application problem of studying the temperature profile in a porous fin model. We have suggested a novel soft computing strategy for the training of unknown weights involved in the feed-forward artificial neural networks (ANNs). Our neuroevolutionary approach is used to suggest approximate solutions to a highly nonlinear doubly singular type of differential equations. We have considered a real application from thermodynamics, which analyses the temperature profile in porous fins. For this purpose, we have used the optimizer, namely, the fractional-order particle swarm optimization technique (FO-DPSO), to minimize errors in solutions through fitness functions. ANNs are used to design the approximate series of solutions to problems considered in this paper. We find the values of unknown weights such that the approximate solutions to these problems have a minimum residual error. For global search in the domain, we have initialized FO-DPSO with random solutions, and it collects best so far solutions in each generation/ iteration. In the second phase, we have fine-tuned our algorithm by initializing FO-DPSO with the collection of best so far solutions. It is graphically illustrated that this strategy is very efficient in terms of convergence and minimum mean squared error in its best solutions. We can use this strategy for the higher-order system of differential equations modeling different important real applications.