A fast boundary integral equation method for point location problem

Abstract

A numerical method based on the boundary integral equation is proposed for the point location problem. For a bounded domain, the integral value is close to 1.0 if a point is inside the domain, and is close to 0.0 when the point is outside the domain. For convenience of integration, the boundary of the domain can be discretized into boundary integral cells. The idea of isogeometric analysis can be easily coupled with the proposed method, i.e., using the parametric functions in geometric modeling to create the integral cells, which results in a mesh-free procedure for which the geometry can be exactly produced at all stages. Thus, the method can be applied to arbitrary shapes and easily embedded in computer-aided design (CAD) packages. The method is time-consuming if implemented directly; a fast multipole method is coupled with the proposed method to accelerate the integral procedure. Some examples of 2D and 3D cases are tested to show the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method.