Jiang et al. (Transportation Research Part B, 2011, 45(2), 343-363) proposed a predictive continuum dynamic user-optimal (PDUO-C) model to investigate the dynamic characteristics of traffic flow and the corresponding route-choice behavior of travelers. The modeled region is a dense urban city, which is arbitrary in shape and has a single central business district (CBD). However, we argue that the model is not well posed due to an inconsistency in the route-choice strategy. To overcome this inconsistency, we revisit the PDUO-C problem, and construct an improved path-choice strategy. The improved model consists of a conservation law to govern the density, in which the flow direction is determined by the improved path-choice strategy, and a Hamilton-Jacobi equation to compute the total travel cost. The simultaneous satisfaction of both equations can be treated as a fixed-point problem. A self-adaptive method of successive averages (MSA) is proposed to solve this fixed-point problem. This method can automatically determine the optimal MSA step size using the least squares approach. Numerical examples are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the model and the solution algorithm.

Since 2000, the study of metamaterial has been a very hot topic due to its potential applications in many areas such as design of invisibility cloak and sub-wavelength imaging. Although several metamaterial models are often used by physicists and engineers, the study of their mathematical properties has lagged behind. In this paper, we initiate our investigation in the plasma-Lorentz model. More specifically, we first discuss the well-posedness of this model, then develop two fully-discrete finite element methods for solving it. Detailed stability and error analysis are carried out, and 3-D numerical results justifying our theoretical analysis are presented.

We establish theoretical recovery guarantees of a family of Riemannian optimization algorithms for low rank matrix recovery, which is about recovering an mimes n rank mimes n matrix from mimes n number of linear measurements. The algorithms are first interpreted as iterative hard thresholding algorithms with subspace projections. Based on this connection, we show that provided the restricted isometry constant mimes n of the sensing operator is less than mimes n, the Riemannian gradient descent algorithm and a restarted variant of the Riemannian conjugate gradient algorithm are guaranteed to converge linearly to the underlying rank mimes n matrix if they are initialized by one step hard thresholding. Empirical evaluation shows that the algorithms are able to recover a low rank matrix from nearly the minimum number of measurements necessary.

We are interested in front propagation problems in the presence of obstacles. We extend a previous work (Bokanowski, Cheng and Shu 09}), to propose a simple and direct discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method adapted to such front propagation problems. We follow the formulation of Bokanowski et al. (Bokanowski_Forcadel_Zidani_2010), leading to a level set formulation driven by $\min(u_t + H(x,\nabla u), u-g(x))=0$, where $g(x)$ is an obstacle function. The DG scheme is motivated by the variational formulation when the Hamiltonian $H$ is a linear function of $\nabla u$, corresponding to linear convection problems in presence of obstacles. The scheme is then generalized to nonlinear equations, written in an explicit form. Stability analysis are performed for the linear case with Euler forward, a Heun scheme and a Runge-Kutta third order time discretization using the technique proposed in Zhang and Shu 2010. Several numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the robustness of the method. Finally, a narrow band approach is considered in order to reduce the computational cost.

In this paper, we present L2 and negative-order norm estimates for the local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method solving variable coefficient Schrödinger equations. For these special solutions the LDG method exhibits ‘‘hidden accuracy", and we are able to extract it through the use of a convolution kernel that is composed of a linear combination of B-splines. This technical was initially introduced by Cockburn, Luskin, Shu, and Süli for linear hyperbolic equations and extended by Ryan et al. as a smoothness-increasing accuracy-conserving (SIAC) filter. We demonstrate that it is possible to extend the SIAC filter on Schrödinger equations. When polynomials of degree k are used, we can prove theoretically the LDG method solutions are of order k + 1, whereas the post-processed solutions that convolution with the SIAC filter are of order at least 2k. Additionally, we present numerical results to confirm that the accuracy of LDG solutions can be improved from O(hk+1) to at least O(h2k+1) for Schrödinger equations by using alternating numerical fluxes.