Introduction

In the last thirty to thirty-five years the Boundary ElementMethod (BEM) has emerged as one of the most powerful computational tools for solving a wide variety of problems in science and engineering. While the Finite Element Method (FEM) is known to be versatile, the BEM brings with it the extraordinary feature of being simple in geometric data preparation. This particular feature of BEM derives from the fact that the discretization of the problem domain is confined to the boundary alone, i.e., the unknowns to be solved for are only on the boundary. The solution inside the domain can be computed as a post-processing step after the unknowns on the boundary points have been solved for.