This paper presents concepts and implementation of the finite element toolbox Kaskade 7, a flexible C++ code for solving elliptic and parabolic PDE systems. Issues such as problem formulation, assembly and adaptivity are discussed at the example of optimal control problems. Trajectory compression for parabolic optimization problems is considered as a case study.
Spectral deferred correction methods for solving stiff ODEs are known to
converge rapidly towards the collocation limit solution on equidistant grids,
but show a much less favourable contraction on non-equidistant grids such as
Radau-IIa points. We interprete SDC methods as fixed point iterations for the
collocation system and propose new DIRK-type sweeps for stiff problems based
on purely linear algebraic considerations. Good convergence is recovered also
on non-equidistant grids. The properties of different variants are explored on
a couple of numerical examples.