There have been substantial developments in meshfree methods, particle methods, and generalized finite element methods since the mid 1990s. The growing interest in these methods is in part due to the fact that they offer extremely flexible numerical tools and can be interpreted in a number of ways. For instance, meshfree methods can be viewed as a natural extension of classical finite element and finite difference methods to scattered node configurations with no fixed connectivity. Furthermore, meshfree methods have a number of advantageous features that are especially attractive when dealing with multiscale phenomena: A-priori knowledge about the solution’s particular local behavior can easily be introduced into the meshfree approximation space, and coarse scale approximations can be seamlessly refined by adding fine scale information. However, the implementation of meshfree methods and their parallelization also requires special attention, for instance with respect to numerical integration.

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