Artificial Multilevel Boundary Element Preconditioners

A hierarchical multilevel preconditioner is constructed for an efficient solution of a first kind boundary integral equation with the single layer potential operator discretized by a boundary element method. This technique is based on a hierarchical clustering of all boundary elements as used in fast boundary element methods. This hierarchy is applied to define a sequence of nested boundary element spaces of piecewise constant basis functions as used in the definition of the preconditioning multilevel operator.