Reduced order model for parametric Boltzmann equation and its application to inverse problems

Abstract

The Boltzmann equation plays an important role in modeling mesoscopic behavior in a wide range of scientific and engineering applications. However, its numerical solution is computationally expensive due to the high dimensionality of the model and the nonlinear nonlocal collision operator, especially for steady-state problems that require iterative solvers. This cost becomes prohibitive for inverse problems, where the induced optimization problem requires repeated forward solves. In this work, we propose a reduced-order model (ROM) for the parametric Boltzmann equation to address this computational challenge. The ROM constructs a low-dimensional approximation space for the parameter-induced solution manifold through a residual-based greedy strategy, and the reduced solution is then obtained via residual minimization over the reduced space, subject to mass conservation. The overall efficiency of the ROM is achieved by exploiting the quadratic structure of the collision operator and a precomputed separable approximation of the collision kernel. The resulting ROM is further applied to a thermally-driven inverse problem for reconstructing collision parameters from the observed macroscopic temperature data. This is accomplished either by directly replacing the PDE constraint with the ROM, leading to a bilevel optimization formulation, or by reformulating the task as a single-level optimization problem through the Karush--Kuhn--Tucker (KKT) conditions. Numerical experiments in both collision-dominated and transport-dominated cases are performed to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed ROM and its effectiveness in inverse problems. In particular, the resulting inverse problem is computationally much more tractable, achieving speedups of several orders of magnitude over that based on the full-order model while maintaining comparable accuracy.