  The Balanced Domain Decomposition (BDD) method and the Finite Element Tearing
and Interconnecting (FETI) method are two commonly used non-overlapping domain
decomposition methods. Due to strong theoretical and numerical similarities,
these two methods are generally considered as being equivalently efficient.
However, for some particular cases, such as for structures with strong
heterogeneities, FETI requires a large number of iterations to compute the
solution compared to BDD. In this paper, the origin of the bad efficiency of
FETI in these particular cases is traced back to poor initial estimates of the
interface stresses. To improve the estimation of interface forces a novel
strategy for splitting interface forces between neighboring substructures is
proposed. The additional computational cost incurred is not significant. This
yields a new initialization for the FETI method and restores numerical
efficiency which makes FETI comparable to BDD even for problems where FETI was
performing poorly. Various simple test problems are presented to discuss the
efficiency of the proposed strategy and to illustrate the so-obtained numerical
equivalence between the BDD and FETI solvers.

Numerical Analysis;Computational Physics