General theory of domain decomposition: Indirect methods (Q4537221)

The article belongs to series of articles reporting a general theory of domain decomposition methods proposed by the first author. The basic unifying concept of this theory, consists in interpreting domain decomposition methods as procedures for obtaining information about the sought solution at the ``internal boundary'', which separates the subdomains from each other, sufficient for defining well-posed problems in each one of the subdomains. This paper is devoted to formulate systematically indirect or Trefftz-Herrera methods and to apply them to differential equations in several dimensions. The Trefftz-Herrera approach is based on a special kind of Green's formulas applicable to discontinuous functions. One of their essential features is the use of weighting functions which yield information about the sought solution at the internal boundary of the domain decomposition exclusively. A special class of Sobolev spaces is introduced in which boundary value problems with prescribed jumps at the internal boundary are formulated. Green's formulas applicable in such Sobolev spaces which contain discontinuous functions are established and from them the general framework for the indirect methods is derived. As an illustration, the method is applied to elliptic problems in several dimensions. A nonstandard method of collocation is derived in this manner, which possesses significant advantages over more standard procedures.