The Douglas–Rachford method has been employed successfully to solve many kinds of nonconvex feasibility problems. In particular, recent research has shown surprising stability for the method when it is applied to finding the intersections of hypersurfaces. Motivated by these discoveries, we reformulate a second order boundary value problem (BVP) as a feasibility problem where the sets are hypersurfaces. We show that such a problem may always be reformulated as a feasibility problem on no more than three sets and is well suited to parallelization. We explore the stability of the method by applying it to several BVPs, including cases where the traditional Newton’s method fails.

The Krasnosel’skiĭ–Mann (KM) iteration is a widely used method to solve fixed point problems. This paper investigates the convergence rate for the KM iteration. We first establish a new convergence rate for the KM iteration which improves the known big-$O$ rate to little-$o$ without any other restrictions. The proof relies on the connection between the KM iteration and a useful technique on the convergence rate of summable sequences. Then we apply the result to give new results on convergence rates for the proximal point algorithm and the Douglas–Rachford method.