This paper presents a stable method for the identification of sources located on the separation interface of two homogeneous media (where one of them is contained by the other one), from measurement yielded by those sources on the exterior boundary of the media. This is an ill-posed problem because numerical instability is presented, i.e., minimal errors in the measurement can result in significant changes in the solution. To obtain the proposed stable method the identification problem is categorized into three subproblems, two of which present numerical instability and regularization methods must be applied to obtain their solution in a stable form. To manage the numerical instability due to the ill-posedness of these subproblems, the Tikhonov regularization and sequential smoothing methods are used. We illustrate this methodology in a circular and irregular region to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method, which yields convergent and stable solutions for input data with and without noise.

Several areas, such as physical and health sciences, require the use of matrices as fundamental tools for solving various problems. Matrices are used in real-life contexts, such as control, automation, and optimization, wherein results are expected to improve with increase of computational precision. However, special attention should be paid to ill-conditioned matrices, which can produce unstable systems; an inadequate handling of precision might worsen results since the solution found for data with errors might be too far from the one for data without errors besides increasing other costs in hardware resources and critical paths. In this paper, we make a wake-up call, using 2 × 2 matrices to show how ill-conditioning and precision can affect system design (resources, cost, etc.). We first demonstrate some examples of real-life problems where ill-conditioning is present in matrices obtained from the discretization of the operational equations (ill-posed in the sense of Hadamard) that model these problems. If these matrices are not handled appropriately (i.e., if ill-conditioning is not considered), large errors can result in the computed solutions to the systems of equations in the presence of errors. Furthermore, we illustrate the generated effect in the calculation of the inverse of an ill-conditioned matrix when its elements are approximated by truncation. We present two case studies to illustrate the effects on calculation errors caused by increasing or reducing precision to s digits. To illustrate the costs, we implemented the adjoint matrix inversion algorithm on different field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), namely, Spartan-7, Artix-7, Kintex-7, and Virtex-7, using the full-unrolling hardware technique. The implemented architecture is useful for analyzing trade-offs when precision is increased; this also helps analyze performance, efficiency, and energy consumption. By means of a detailed description of the trade-offs among these metrics, concerning precision and ill-conditioning, we conclude that the need for resources seems to grow not linearly when precision is increased. We also conclude that, if error is to be reduced below a certain threshold, it is necessary to determine an optimal precision point. Otherwise, the system becomes more sensitive to measurement errors and a better alternative would be to choose precision carefully, and/or to apply regularization or preconditioning methods, which would also reduce the resources required.

In this work, we present a numerical algorithm to solve the inverse problem of volumetric sources from measurements on the boundary of a non-homogeneous conductive medium, which is made of conductive layers with constant conductivity in each layer. This inverse problem is ill-posed since there is more than one source that can generate the same measurement. Furthermore, the ill-posedness is due to the fact that small variations (or errors) in the measurement (input data) can produce substantial variations in the identified source location. We propose two steps to solve this inverse problem in some classes of sources: we first recover the harmonic part of the volumetric source, and, in a second step, we compute the non-harmonic part of the source. For the reconstruction of the harmonic part of the source, we follow a variational approach based on the reformulation of the inverse problem as a distributed control problem, for which the cost function incorporates a penalized term with the input data on the boundary. This cost function is minimized by a conjugate gradient algorithm in combination with a finite element discretization. We recover the non-harmonic component of the source using a priori information and an iterative algorithm for some particular classes of sources. To validate the numerical methodology, we develop synthetic examples both in circular (simple) and irregular (complex) regions. The numerical results show that the proposed methodology allows to recover the complete source and produce stable and accurate numerical solutions.