Wolfgang Dahmen, Christian Plesken, Gerrit Welper
The central objective of this paper is to develop reduced basis methods for parameter dependent transport dominated problems that are rigorously proven to exhibit rate-optimal performance when compared with the Kolmogorov $n$-widths of the solution sets. The central ingredient is the construction of computationally feasible "tight" surrogates which in turn are based on deriving a suitable well-conditioned variational formulation for the parameter dependent problem. The theoretical results are illustrated by numerical experiments for convection-diffusion and pure transport equations. In particular, the latter example sheds some light on the smoothness of the dependence of the solutions on the parameters.