Wavelet adaptive method for second order elliptic problems: boundary conditions and domain decomposition

Summary. Wavelet methods allow to combine high order accuracy, multilevel preconditioning techniques and adaptive approximation, in order to solve efficiently elliptic operator equations. One of the main difficulty in this context is the efficient treatment of non-homogeneous boundary conditions. In this paper, we propose a strategy that allows to append such conditions in the setting of space refinement (i.e. adaptive) discretizations of second order problems. Our method is based on the use of compatible multiscale decompositions for both the domain and its boundary, and on the possibility of characterizing various function spaces from the numerical properties of these decompositions. In particular, this allows the construction of a lifting operator which is stable for a certain range of smoothness classes, and preserves the compression of the solution in the wavelet basis. An explicit construction of the wavelet bases and the lifting is proposed on fairly general domains, based on conforming domain decomposition techniques. Received November 2, 1998 / Published online April 20, 2000