May 15–17, 2017 in Prague, Czech Republic
        
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Title:  Failure Modes of Tearing and a Novel Robust Approach  
Authors: Ali Baharev, Arnold Neumaier and Hermann Schichl
Abstract:State-of-the-art Modelica implementations may fail in various ways when 
tearing is turned on: Completely incorrect results are returned without 
a warning, or the software fails with an obscure error message, or it 
hangs for several minutes although the problem is solvable in 
milliseconds without tearing. We give three detailed examples and an 
in-depth discussion why such failures are inherent in tearing and cannot 
be fixed within the traditional approach.
Without compromising the advantages of tearing, these issues are 
resolved for the first time with staircase sampling. This is a 
non-tearing method capable of robustly finding all well-separated 
solutions of sparse systems of nonlinear equations without any initial 
guesses. Its robustness is demonstrated on the steady-state simulation 
of a particularly challenging distillation column. This column has three 
solutions, one of which is missed by most methods, including 
problem-specific tearing methods. All three solutions are found with 
staircase sampling.
Links: Full paper