2.1 How to decide which fractional stepping to use?

Given a mixed PDE such as \(u_{t}=Au+Bu\) where \(A,B\) are constant matrices.

Let standard stepping be

\[\begin {array} [c]{c}u^{\ast }=N_{A}\left ( u^{n},k\right ) \\ u^{n+1}=N_{B}\left ( u^{\ast },k\right ) \end {array} \]

Where \(N_{A}\) and \(N_{B}\) are numerical schemes to solve the problem \(u_{t}=Au\) and \(u_{t}=Bu\) respectively. \(k\) in the above is the time step.

Let Strang splitting be

\[\begin {array} [c]{c}u^{\ast }=N_{A}\left ( u^{n},k/2\right ) \\ u^{\ast \ast }=N_{B}\left ( u^{\ast },k\right ) \\ u^{n+1}=N_{A}\left ( u^{\ast \ast },k/2\right ) \end {array} \]

Now, assuming that \(N_{A}\) and \(N_{B}\) are each second order accurate in time. Which of the above two schemes should one select?

Algorithm

---- standard stepping
IF A,B commute THEN
   standard stepping is second order in time
ELSE
   standard stepping is first order in time
END IF

---- Strang
IF A,B commute THEN
   strang gives second order accuracy in time
ELSE
   strang also gives second order accuracy in time
END IF

Hence, from the above, the conclusion is that

IF A,B commute THEN
   select standard stepping (simpler)
ELSE
   select Strang (more accurate)
END IF

some notes from the net HTML

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