A space decomposition method for parabolic equations

A convergence proof is given for an abstract parabolic equation using general space decomposition techniques. The space decomposition technique may be a domain decomposition method, a multilevel method, or a multigrid method. It is shown that if the Euler or Crank–Nicolson scheme is used for the parabolic equation, then by suitably choosing the space decomposition, only O(| log τ |) steps of iteration at each time level are needed, where τ is the time-step size. Applications to overlapping domain decomposition and to a two-level method are given for a second-order parabolic equation. The analysis shows that only a one-element overlap is needed. Discussions about iterative and noniterative methods for parabolic equations are presented. A method that combines the two approaches and utilizes some of the good properties of the two approaches is tested numerically. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 14: 27–46, 1998