A Green’s function formulation of nonlocal finite-difference schemes for reaction-diffusion equations

Reaction-diffusion equations are commonly used in different science and engineering fields to describe spatial patterns arising from the interaction of chemical or biochemical reactions and diffusive transport mechanisms. The aim of this work is to show that a Green’s function formulation of reaction-diffusion PDEs is a suitable framework to derive FD schemes incorporating both O(h²) accuracy and nonlocal approximations in the whole domain (including boundary nodes). By doing so, the approach departs from a Green’s function formulation of the boundary-value problem to pose an approximation problem based on a domain decomposition. Within each subdomain, the corresponding integral equation is forced to have zero residual at given grid points. Different FD schemes are obtained depending on the numerical scheme used for computing the Green’s integral over each subdomain. Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions are considered, showing that the FD scheme based on the Green’s function formulation incorporates, in a natural way, the effects of boundary nodes in the discretization approximation.