Verifying approximate solutions to differential equations

It is now standard practice in computational science for large-scale simulations to be implemented and investigated in a problem solving environment (PSE) such as MATLAB or MAPLE. In such an environment, a scientist or engineer will formulate a mathematical model, approximate its solution using an appropriate numerical method, visualize the approximate solution and verify (or validate) the quality of the approximate solution. Traditionally, we have been most concerned with the development of effective numerical software for generating the approximate solution and several efficient and reliable numerical libraries are now available for use within the most widely used PSEs. On the other hand, the visualization and verification tasks have received little attention, even though each often requires as much computational effort as is involved in generating the approximate solution.In this paper, we will investigate the effectiveness of a suite of tools that we have recently introduced in the MATLAB PSE to verify approximate solutions of ordinary differential equations. We will use the notion of ‘effectivity index’, widely used by researchers in the adaptive mesh PDE community, to quantify the credibility of our verification tools. Numerical examples will be presented to illustrate the effectiveness of these tools when applied to a standard numerical method on two model test problems.