  The paper deals with the accuracy of guaranteed error bounds on outputs of
interest computed from approximate methods such as the finite element method. A
considerable improvement is introduced for linear problems thanks to new
bounding techniques based on Saint-Venant's principle. The main breakthrough of
these optimized bounding techniques is the use of properties of homothetic
domains which enables to cleverly derive guaranteed and accurate boundings of
contributions to the global error estimate over a local region of the domain.
Performances of these techniques are illustrated through several numerical
experiments.
