A deep learning approach to solve forward differential problems on graphs

Abstract: We propose a novel deep learning (DL) approach to solve one-dimensional non-linear elliptic, parabolic, and hyperbolic problems on graphs. A system of physics-informed neural network (PINN) models is used to solve the differential equations, by assigning each PINN model to a specific edge of the graph. Kirkhoff-Neumann (KN) nodal conditions are imposed in a weak form by adding a penalization term to the training loss function. Through the penalization term that imposes the KN conditions, PINN models associated with edges that share a node coordinate with each other to ensure continuity of the solution and of its directional derivatives computed along the respective edges. Using individual PINN models for each edge of the graph allows our approach to fulfill necessary requirements for parallelization by enabling different PINN models to be trained on distributed compute resources. Numerical results show that the system of PINN models accurately approximate the solutions of the differential problems across the entire graph for a broad set of graph topologies.