A Posteriori Error Estimator Competition for Conforming Obstacle Problems

This article on the a posteriori error analysis of the obstacle problem with affine obstacles and Courant finite elements compares five classes of error estimates for accurate guaranteed error control. To treat interesting computational benchmarks, the first part extends the Braess methodology from 2005 of the resulting a posteriori error control to mixed inhomogeneous boundary conditions. The resulting guaranteed global upper bound involves some auxiliary partial differential equation and leads to four contributions with explicit constants. Their efficiency is examined affirmatively for five benchmark examples. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 00: 000–000, 2012