Abstract: The optimal control goals of urban district heating control systems are to meet heating demand while achieving high energy saving, emission reduction, and environmental protection under the premise of on-demand heating. The district heating system is a multi-input, multi-output system with nonlinearity, large time-delay, and strong coupling. Thus, achieving an ideal control effect using the classical control theory is difficult. The operation adjustment of the heating system is one of the main factors that influence energy consumption. Thus, this study mainly focuses on the heat source-heat production optimization problem of the district heating system. This study proposes a heat source-total heat supply optimizing control method based on the action-dependent heuristic dynamic programming (ADHDP) algorithm. This method takes the total energy consumption of the heating production system as the optimal objective function to meet the demand of heat consumers. The minimum value of the objective function is solved, and the optimization set point of heat source outlet water temperature and water flow is obtained. The effectiveness of the method is proven by simulation experiments implemented with the MATLAB language; the method has a remarkable energy saving effect.