This book provides a comprehensive examination of preconditioners for boundary element discretisations of first-kind integral equations. Focusing on domain-decomposition-type and multilevel methods, it allows readers to gain a good understanding of the mechanisms and necessary techniques in the analysis of the preconditioners. These techniques are unique for the discretisation of first-kind integral equations since the resulting systems of linear equations are not only large and ill-conditioned, but also dense.



The book showcases state-of-the-art preconditioning techniques for boundary integral equations, presenting up-to-date research. It also includes a detailed discussion of Sobolev spaces of fractional orders to familiarise readers with important mathematical tools for the analysis. Furthermore, the concise overview of adaptive BEM, hp-version BEM, and coupling of FEM-BEM provides efficient computational tools for solving practical problems with applications in science and engineering.