Convergence estimates for product iterative methods with applications to domain decomposition

In this paper, we consider iterative methods for the solution of symmetric positive definite problems on a space V which are defined in terms of products of operators defined with respect to a number of subspaces. The simplest algorithm of this sort has an error-reducing operator which is the product of orthogonal projections onto the complement of the subspaces. New norm-reduction estimates for these iterative techniques will be presented in an abstract setting. Applications are given for overlapping Schwarz algorithms with many subregions for finite element approximation of second-order elliptic problems.