Schwarz iterations for the efficient solution of screen problems with boundary elements (Q1906684)

Schwarz methods are domain decomposition algorithms and they have been used and analyzed extensively for elliptic partial differential equations. The present paper is a contribution to the much smaller literature on Schwarz methods for boundary element methods. After a general introduction, the authors give a short introduction to multiplicative and additive Schwarz algorithms and their basic theory. Their algorithm is based on one level of overlapping subregions the union of which covers the region on which the integral operator is defined. Each of these subregions is partitioned into elements and piecewise constant elements are used to approximate certain Fredholm integral equations of the first kind by using a Galerkin procedure. One of the main results shows that the rate of convergence of the Schwarz methods is independent of the dimension of the finite element space. As often is the case, an extension theorem plays a central role. The other major issue is, as always, how the performance depends on \(k\), the number of subregions. By using the tools of the trade, the authors establish that the condition number of the additive Schwarz operator is bounded from above by the third power of \(k\). The numerical experiments reported in the paper, add to its value, and indicate that the methods behave better than what this result might suggest.