Difference equations versus differential equations, a possible equivalence for the Rössler system?

Abstract

When a set of nonlinear differential equations is investigated, most of time there is no analytical solution and only numerical integration techniques can provide accurate numerical solutions. In a general way the process of numerical integration is the replacement of a set of differential equations with a continuous dependence on the time by a model for which the time variable is discrete. In numerical investigations a fourth-order Runge-Kutta integration scheme is usually sufficient. Nevertheless, sometimes a set of difference equations may be required and, in this case, standard schemes like the forward Euler, backward Euler or central difference schemes are used. The major problem encountered with these schemes is that they offer numerical solutions equivalent to those of the set of differential equations only for sufficiently small integration time steps. In some cases, it may be of interest to obtain difference equations with the same type of solutions as for the differential equations but with significantly large time steps. Nonstandard schemes as introduced by Mickens [Nonstandard Finite Difference Models of Differential Equations, World Scientific, 1994] allow to obtain more robust difference equations. In this paper, using such nonstandard scheme, we propose some difference equations as discrete analogues of the Rössler system for which it is shown that the dynamics is less dependent on the time step size than when a nonstandard scheme is used. In particular, it has been observed that the solutions to the discrete models are topologically equivalent to the solutions to the Rössler system as long as the time step is less than the threshold value associated with the Nyquist criterion. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.