A variational interpretation of Restricted Additive Schwarz with impedance transmission condition for the Helmholtz problem

In this paper we revisit the Restricted Additive Schwarz method for solving discretized Helmholtz problems, using impedance boundary conditions on subdomains (sometimes called ORAS). We present this method in its variational form and show that it can be seen as a finite element discretization of a parallel overlapping domain decomposition method defined at the PDE level. In a fourthcoming paper, the authors have proved certain contractive properties of the error propagation operator for this method at the PDE level, under certain geometrical assumptions. We illustrate computationally that these properties are also enjoyed by its finite element approximation, i.e., the ORAS method.