Enforcing exact boundary and initial conditions in the deep mixed residual method

Abstract: In theory, boundary and initial conditions are important for the wellposedness of partial differential equations (PDEs). Numerically, these conditions can be enforced exactly in classical numerical methods, such as finite difference method and finite element method. Recent years have witnessed growing interests in solving PDEs by deep neural networks (DNNs), especially in the high-dimensional case. However, in the generic situation, a careful literature review shows that boundary conditions cannot be enforced exactly for DNNs, which inevitably leads to a modeling error. In this work, based on the recently developed deep mixed residual method (MIM), we demonstrate how to make DNNs satisfy boundary and initial conditions automatically in a systematic manner. As a consequence, the loss function in MIM is free of the penalty term and does not have any modeling error. Using numerous examples, including Dirichlet, Neumann, mixed, Robin, and periodic boundary conditions for elliptic equations, and initial conditions for parabolic and hyperbolic equations, we show that enforcing exact boundary and initial conditions not only provides a better approximate solution but also facilitates the training process.