Section: Scientific Foundations
Numerical tools: Parameter identification and numerical sensitivities
Numerical simulations generally involve parameters of different nature. Some parameters reflect physical properties of the materials under consideration, or describe the way they interact. In addition to these parameters the values of which are often determined by experiments and sometimes only known with accuracy under certain conditions, the development of a computational model involves additional quantities, which could for example be related to boundary and initial conditions.
The generalization of the DWR method to parameter identification problems has been developed in [42] , and [41] for time-dependent equations. The case of finite-dimensional parameters, which is theoretically less challenging than the infinite-dimensional case and has therefore been less treated in the literature, is of particular interest in view of the presented applications (for example the estimation of a set of diffusion velocities).
The goal of numerical simulations are in general the computation of given output values I which are obtained from the approximated physical fields by additional computations, often termed post-processing . The DWR method places these output values in the center of interest and aims at providing reliable and efficient computations of these quantities.
In the context of calibration of parameter values with experiments, it seems to be natural to go one step beyond the sole computation of I .
Indeed, the computation of numerical sensitivities or condition numbers 
I/qi where qi denotes a single parameter can be expected to be of practical and theoretical interest, either in order to improve the design of experiments, or in order to help to analyze the outcome of an experiment.
It turns out, that similar techniques as those employed for parameter identification can be used in order to obtain information on parameter sensitivities and corresponding a posteriori error analysis [4] .
