Overlapping Domain Decomposition Methods for Linear Inverse Problems

We shall derive and propose several efficient overlapping domain decomposition methods for solving some typical linear inverse problems, including the identification of the flux, the source strength and the initial temperature in second order elliptic and parabolic systems. The methods are iterative, and computationally very efficient: only local forward and adjoint problems need to be solved in each subdomain, and the local minimizations have explicit solutions. Numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the methods: the algorithms converge globally, even with rather poor initial guesses; and their convergences do not deteriorate or deteriorate only slightly when the meshes are refined.