An Efficient Method for Solving Two-Dimensional Partial Differential Equations with the Deep Operator Network

Abstract

Partial differential equations (PDEs) usually apply for modeling complex physical phenomena in the real world, and the corresponding solution is the key to interpreting these problems. Generally, traditional solving methods suffer from inefficiency and time consumption. At the same time, the current rise in machine learning algorithms, represented by the Deep Operator Network (DeepONet), could compensate for these shortcomings and effectively predict the solutions of PDEs by learning the operators from the data. The current deep learning-based methods focus on solving one-dimensional PDEs, but the research on higher-dimensional problems is still in development. Therefore, this paper proposes an efficient scheme to predict the solution of two-dimensional PDEs with improved DeepONet. In order to construct the data needed for training, the functions are sampled from a classical function space and produce the corresponding two-dimensional data. The difference method is used to obtain the numerical solutions of the PDEs and form a point-value data set. For training the network, the matrix representing two-dimensional functions is processed to form vectors and adapt the DeepONet model perfectly. In addition, we theoretically prove that the discrete point division of the data ensures that the model loss is guaranteed to be in a small range. This method is verified for predicting the two-dimensional Poisson equation and heat conduction equation solutions through experiments. Compared with other methods, the proposed scheme is simple and effective.