A backward problem for the time-fractional pseudo-parabolic equation with a variable coefficient

TL;DR

This paper investigates an inverse problem for a time-fractional pseudo-parabolic equation with variable coefficients, establishing theoretical results and developing a numerical method for initial state reconstruction from final-time data.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach combining theoretical analysis and a finite-difference scheme for solving the inverse problem with variable coefficients.

Findings

Proved existence and uniqueness of the solution.

Developed a stable and convergent numerical scheme.

Validated the method with numerical experiments including noisy data.

Abstract

This work addresses an inverse reconstruction task for a time-fractional pseudo-parabolic model with a temporally varying coefficient. By imposing Dirichlet boundary conditions, we aim to recover the unknown initial state from observations collected at the final time. From a theoretical perspective, we derive existence and uniqueness results by proving that, under suitable hypotheses, the problem admits a unique solution. Computationally, we introduce a finite-difference discretisation based on a time-stepping strategy and provide a detailed stability and convergence analysis. Leveraging the resulting forward solver, we then formulate an initial-data identification procedure using Tikhonov regularisation. The proposed approach is validated with numerical simulations, and its resilience is assessed via experiments that incorporate perturbations in the final-time measurements.