A new approach to minimising the frontwidth in finite element calculations (Q1912069)

We propose a new approach to determine the element ordering that minimises the frontwidth in finite element computations. The optimisation problem is formulated using graph theoretic concepts. We develop a divide-and-conquer strategy which defines a series of graph partitioning subproblems. The latter are tackled by means of three different heuristics, namely the Kernighan-Lin deterministic technique, and the non-deterministic simulated annealing and stochastic evolution algorithms. Results obtained for various two-dimensional and three-dimensional finite element meshes, whether structured or non-structured, reveal the superiority of the proposed approach relative to the standard algorithms.