In order to overcome the computational challenges associated with block preconditioners for Krylov subspace methods, particularly those arising from Schur complement systems, this paper proposes an improved new block (INB) preconditioner for solving 3 × 3 block saddle point problems. A detailed semi-convergence analysis of the iterative scheme induced by the INB preconditioner is provided. Moreover, the spectral properties of the preconditioned matrix are analyzed, revealing strong eigenvalue clustering around one. Efficient formulas for selecting quasi-optimal parameters are derived based on Frobenius-norm minimization. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed INB preconditioner significantly reduces iteration counts and CPU time compared with several existing block preconditioners.
Shao et al. (Fri,) studied this question.