Implications of the Choice of Quadrature Nodes for Picard Integral Deferred Corrections Methods for Ordinary Differential Equations

This paper concerns a class of deferred correction methods recently developed for initial value ordinary differential equations; such methods are based on a Picard integral form of the correction equation. These methods divide a given timestep [tn, tn+1] into substeps, and use function values computed at these substeps to approximate the Picard integral by means of a numerical quadrature. The main purpose of this paper is to present a detailed analysis of the implications of the location of quadrature nodes on the accuracy and stability of the overall method. Comparisons between Gauss-Legendre, Gauss-Lobatto, Gauss-Radau, and uniformly spaced points are presented. Also, for a given set of quadrature nodes, quadrature rules may be formulated that include or exclude function values computed at the left-hand endpoint tn. Quadrature rules that do not depend on the left-hand endpoint (which are referred to as right-hand quadrature rules) are shown to lead to L(α)-stable implicit methods with α ≈ π/2. The semiimplicit analog of this property is also discussed. Numerical results suggest that the use of uniform quadrature nodes, as opposed to nodes based on Gaussian quadratures, does not significantly affect the stability or accuracy of these methods for orders less than ten. In contrast, a study of the reduction of order for stiff equations shows that when uniform quadrature nodes are used in conjunction with a right-hand quadrature rule, the form and extent of order-reduction changes considerably. Specifically, a reduction of order to O( ) is observed for uniform nodes as opposed to O( ∆t) for non-uniform nodes, where ∆t denotes the time step and a stiffness parameter such that → 0 corresponds to the problem becoming increasingly stiff. AMS subject classification (2000): 65B05.