Many physical problems lead to boundary value problems for partial differential equations, which can be solved with the finite element method. In order to construct adaptive solution algorithms or to measure the error one aims at reliable a posteriori error estimators. Many such estimators are known, as well as their theoretical foundation. Some boundary value problems yield so-called anisotropic solutions (e.g. with boundary layers). Then anisotropic finite element meshes can be advantageous. However, the common error estimators for isotropic meshes fail when applied to anisotropic meshes, or they were not investigated yet. For rectangular or cuboidal anisotropic meshes a modified error estimator had already been derived. In this paper error estimators for anisotropic tetrahedral or triangular meshes are considered. Such meshes offer a greater geometrical flexibility. For the Poisson equation we introduce a residual error estimator, an estimator based on a local problem, several Zienkiewicz-Zhu estimators, and an L_2 error estimator, respectively. A corresponding mathematical theory is given.For a singularly perturbed reaction-diffusion equation a residual error estimator is derived as well. The numerical examples demonstrate that reliable and efficient error estimation is possible on anisotropic meshes. The analysis basically relies on two important tools, namely anisotropic interpolation error estimates and the so-called bubble functions. Moreover, the correspondence of an anisotropic mesh with an anisotropic solution plays a vital role. AMS(MOS): 65N30, 65N15, 35B25

When the finite element method is used to solve boundary value problems, the corresponding finite element mesh is appropriate if it is reflects the behavior of the true solution. A posteriori error estimators are suited to construct adequate meshes. They are useful to measure the quality of an approximate solution and to design adaptive solution algorithms. Singularly perturbed problems yield in general solutions with anisotropic features, e.g. strong boundary or interior layers. For such problems it is useful to use anisotropic meshes in order to reach maximal order of convergence. Moreover, the quality of the numerical solution rests on the robustness of the a posteriori error estimation with respect to both the anisotropy of the mesh and the perturbation parameters. There exist different possibilities to measure the a posteriori error in the energy norm for the singularly perturbed reaction-diffusion equation. One of them is the equilibrated residual method which is known to be robust as long as one solves auxiliary local Neumann problems exactly on each element. We provide a basis for an approximate solution of the aforementioned auxiliary problem and show that this approximation does not affect the quality of the error estimation. Another approach that we develope for the a posteriori error estimation is the hierarchical error estimator. The robustness proof for this estimator involves some stages including the strengthened Cauchy-Schwarz inequality and the error reduction property for the chosen space enrichment. In the rest of the work we deal with adaptive algorithms. We provide an overview of the existing methods for the isotropic meshes and then generalize the ideas for the anisotropic case. For the resulting algorithm the error reduction estimates are proven for the Poisson equation and for the singularly perturbed reaction-difussion equation. The convergence for the Poisson equation is also shown. Numerical experiments for the equilibrated residual method, for the hierarchical error estimator and for the adaptive algorithm confirm the theory. The adaptive algorithm shows its potential by creating the anisotropic mesh for the problem with the boundary layer starting with a very coarse isotropic mesh.

It is well-known that the solution of a so-called singularly perturbed differential equation exhibits layers. These are small regions in the domain where the solution changes drastically. These layers deteriorate the convergence of standard numerical algorithms, such as the finite element method on a uniform mesh. In the past many approaches were developed to overcome this difficulty. In this context it was very helpful to understand the structure of the solution - especially to know where the layers can occur. Therefore, we have a lot of analysis in the literature concerning the properties of solutions of such problems. Nevertheless, this field is far from being understood conclusively. More recently, there is an increasing interest in the numerics of optimal control problems subject to a singularly perturbed convection-diffusion equation and box constraints for the control. However, it is not much known about the solutions of such optimal control problems. The proposed solution methods are based on the experience one has from scalar singularly perturbed differential equations, but so far, the analysis presented does not use the structure of the solution and in fact, the provided bounds are rather meaningless for solutions which exhibit boundary layers, since these bounds scale like epsilon^(-1.5) as epsilon converges to 0. In this thesis we strive to prove bounds for the solution and its derivatives of the optimal control problem. These bounds show that there is an additional layer that is weaker than the layers one expects knowing the results for scalar differential equation problems, but that weak layer deteriorates the convergence of the proposed methods. In Chapter 1 and 2 we discuss the optimal control problem for the one-dimensional case. We consider the case without control constraints and the case with control constraints separately. For the case without control constraints we develop a method to prove bounds for arbitrary derivatives of the solution, given the data is smooth enough. For the latter case we prove bounds for the derivatives up to the second order. Subsequently, we discuss several discretization methods. In this context we use special Shishkin meshes. These meshes are piecewise equidistant, but have a very fine subdivision in the region of the layers. Additionally, we consider different ways of discretizing the control constraints. The first one enforces the compliance of the constraints everywhere and the other one enforces it only in the mesh nodes. For each proposed algorithm we prove convergence estimates that are independent of the parameter epsilon. Hence, they are meaningful even for small values of epsilon. As a next step we turn to the two-dimensional case. To be able to adapt the proofs of Chapter 2 to this case we require bounds for the solution of the scalar differential equation problem for a right hand side f only in W^(1,infty). Although, a lot of results for this problem can be found in the literature but we can not apply any of them, because they require a smooth right hand side f in C^(2,alpha) for some alpha in (0,1). Therefore, we dedicate Chapter 3 to the analysis of the scalar differential equations problem only using a right hand side f that is not very smooth. In Chapter 4 we strive to prove bounds for the solution of the optimal control problem in the two dimensional case. The analysis for this problem is not complete. Especially, the characteristic layers induce subproblems that are not understood completely. Hence, we can not prove sharp bounds for all terms in the solution decomposition we construct. Nevertheless, we propose a solution method. Numerical results indicate an epsilon-independent convergence for the considered examples - although we are not able to prove this.