Derivation and Application of Multistep Methods to a Class of First-order Ordinary Differential Equations

Abstract

Of concern in this work is the derivation and implementation of the multistep methods through Taylor’s expansion and numerical integration. For the Taylor’s expansion method, the series is truncated after some terms to give the needed approximations which allows for the necessary substitutions for the derivatives to be evaluated on the differential equations. For the numerical integration technique, an interpolating polynomial that is determined by some data points replaces the differential equation function and it is integrated over a specified interval. The methods show that they are only convergent if and only if they are consistent and stable. In our numerical examples, the methods are applied on non-stiff initial value problems of first-order ordinary differential equations, where it is established that the multistep methods show superiority over the single-step methods in terms of robustness, efficiency, stability and accuracy, the only setback being that the multi-step methods require more computational effort than the single-step methods.