Nonstandard finite difference schemes for an sir epidemic model

Abstract

This paper aims to present two nonstandard finite difference (NFSD) methods to solve an SIR epidemic model. The proposed methods have important properties such as positivity and boundedness and they also preserve conservation law. Numerical comparisons confirm that the accuracy of our method is better than that of other existing standard methods such as the second-order Runge–Kutta (RK2) method, the Euler method and some ready-made MATLAB codes.