Bernstein collocation method for neutral type functional differential equation

Abstract

Functional differential equations of neutral type are a class of differential equations in which the derivative of the unknown functions depends on the history of the function and its derivative as well. Due to this nature the explicit solutions of these equations are not easy to compute and sometime even not possible. Therefore, one must use some numerical technique to find an approximate solution to these equations. In this paper, we used a spectral collocation method which is based on Bernstein polynomials to find the approximate solution. The disadvantage of using Bernstein polynomials is that they are not orthogonal and therefore one cannot use the properties of orthogonal polynomials for the efficient evaluation of differential equations. In order to avoid this issue and to fully use the properties of orthogonal polynomials, a change of basis transformation from Bernstein to Legendre polynomials is used. An error analysis in infinity norm is provided, followed by several numerical examples to justify the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed scheme.