Multi-resolution Isogeometric Analysis -- Efficient adaptivity utilizing the multi-patch structure

Isogeometric Analysis (IgA) is a spline based approach to the numerical solution of partial differential equations. There are two major issues that IgA was designed to address. The first issue is the exact representation of domains stemming from Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. In practice, this can be realized only with multi-patch IgA, often in combination with trimming or similar techniques. The second issue is the realization of high-order discretizations (by increasing the spline degree) with numbers of degrees of freedom comparable to low-order methods. High-order methods can deliver their full potential only if the solution to be approximated is sufficiently smooth; otherwise, adaptive methods are required. In the last decades, a zoo of local refinement strategies for splines has been developed. The authors think that many of these approaches are a burden to implement efficiently and impede the utilization of recent advances that rely on tensor-product splines, e.g., concerning matrix assembly and preconditioning. The implementation seems to be particularly cumbersome in the context of multi-patch IgA. Our approach is to moderately increase the number of patches and to utilize different grid sizes on different patches. This allows reusing the existing code bases, recovers the convergence rates of other adaptive approaches and increases the number of degrees of freedom only marginally.