A black-box method using the finite elements, the Crank–Nicolson and a nonmonotone truncated Newton (TN) method is presented for solving optimal control problems (OCPs) governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). The proposed method finds the optimal control of a class of linear and nonlinear parabolic distributed parameter systems with a quadratic cost functional. To this end, the piecewise linear finite elements method and the well-known Crank–Nicolson method are used for discretizing in space and in time, respectively. Afterwards, regarding the implicit function theorem (IFT), the optimal control problem is transformed into an unconstrained nonlinear optimization problem. Considering that in a gradient-based method for solving optimal control problems, the evaluations of gradients and Hessians of the cost functional is important, hence, an adjoint technique is used to evaluate them effectively. In addition, to make a globalization strategy, we first introduce an adaptive nonmonotone strategy which properly controls the degree of nonmonotonicity and then incorporate it into an inexact Armijo-type line search approach to construct a more relaxed line search procedure. Finally, the obtained unconstrained nonlinear optimization problem is solved by utilizing the proposed nonmonotone truncated Newton method. Results gained from the new offered method compared with existing methods show that the new method is promising.

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