Abstract
The task of repeatedly solving parametrized partial differential equations (pPDEs) in optimization, control, or interactive applications makes it imperative to design highly efficient and equally accurate surrogate models. The reduced basis method (RBM) presents itself as such an option. Accompanied by a mathematically rigorous error estimator, RBM carefully constructs a low-dimensional subspace of the parameter-induced high fidelity solution manifold on which an approximate solution is computed. It can improve efficiency by several orders of magnitudes leveraging an offline-online decomposition procedure. However this decomposition, usually implemented with aid from the empirical interpolation method (EIM) for nonlinear and/or parametric-nonaffine PDEs, can be challenging to implement, or results in severely degraded online efficiency. In this paper, we augment and extend the EIM approach as a direct solver, as opposed to an assistant, for solving nonlinear pPDEs on the reduced level. The resulting method, called Reduced Over-Collocation method (ROC), is stable and capable of avoiding efficiency degradation exhibited in traditional applications of EIM. Two critical ingredients of the scheme are collocation at about twice as many locations as the dimension of the reduced approximation space, and an efficient L1-norm-based error indicator for the strategic selection of the parameter values whose snapshots span the reduced approximation space. Together, these two ingredients ensure that the proposed L1-ROC scheme is both offline- and online-efficient. A distinctive feature is that the efficiency degradation appearing in alternative RBM approaches that utilize EIM for nonlinear and nonaffine problems is circumvented, both in the offline and online stages. Numerical tests on different families of time-dependent and steady-state nonlinear problems demonstrate the high efficiency and accuracy of L1-ROC and its superior stability performance.