A Duality Approach to Error Estimation for Variational Inequalities

Motivated by problems in contact mechanics, we propose a duality approach for computing approximations and associated a posteriori error bounds to solutions of variational inequalities of the first kind. The proposed approach improves upon existing methods introduced in the context of the reduced basis method in two ways. First, it provides sharp a posteriori error bounds which mimic the rate of convergence of the RB approximation. Second, it enables a full offline-online computational decomposition in which the online cost is completely independent of the dimension of the original (high-dimensional) problem. Numerical results comparing the performance of the proposed and existing approaches illustrate the superiority of the duality approach in cases where the dimension of the full problem is high.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figure

Handling convexity-like constraints in variational problems

We provide a general framework to construct finite dimensional approximations of the space of convex functions, which also applies to the space of c-convex functions and to the space of support functions of convex bodies. We give estimates of the distance between the approximation space and the admissible set. This framework applies to the approximation of convex functions by piecewise linear functions on a mesh of the domain and by other finite-dimensional spaces such as tensor-product splines. We show how these discretizations are well suited for the numerical solution of problems of calculus of variations under convexity constraints. Our implementation relies on proximal algorithms, and can be easily parallelized, thus making it applicable to large scale problems in dimension two and three. We illustrate the versatility and the efficiency of our approach on the numerical solution of three problems in calculus of variation : 3D denoising, the principal agent problem, and optimization within the class of convex bodies.Comment: 23 page