A penalty approximation method for a semilinear parabolic double obstacle problem

In this work, we present a novel power penalty method for the approximation of a global solution to a double obstacle complementarity problem involving a semilinear parabolic differential operator and a bounded feasible solution set. We first rewrite the double obstacle complementarity problem as a double obstacle variational inequality problem. Then, we construct a semilinear parabolic partial differential equation (penalized equation) for approximating the variational inequality problem. We prove that the solution to the penalized equation converges to that of the variational inequality problem and obtain a convergence rate that is corresponding to the power used in the formulation of the penalized equation. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the theoretical findings. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014