A Genetic Algorithm for Pointwise Source Reconstruction by the Method of
Fundamental Solutions
Abstract
Inverse source reconstruction problems offer great potential for
applications of interest to engineering, such as the identification of
polluting sources, and to medicine, such as electroencephalography, to
cite at least two relevant examples. From a mathematical point of view,
the identification of a concentrated source (intensity and location)
corresponds to the identification of the centroid (location) and size
(intensity) of a distributed source. On the other hand, from a numerical
point of view, it is observed that the use of domain discretization
methods is intrinsically associated with the introduction of numerical
noise in reconstruction algorithms, which is strongly inadvisable since
inverse problems are reckoned to be ill-posed. The objective of this
work is to explore, in the context of a Poisson problem and taking into
account a numerical point of view, a new reconstruction algorithm based
on the method of fundamental solutions, where a source point adequately
represents the pointwise source within the domain. The inverse problem
is reformulated as an optimization problem solved through a genetic
algorithm. Finally, numerical examples are performed to analyze the
accuracy of the proposed algorithm for two and three dimensions.