On the zero-stability of variable stepsize multistep methods: the spectral radius approach

Summary. In this paper we illustrate a novel approach for studying the asymptotic behaviour of the solutions of linear difference equations with variable coefficients. In particular, we deal with the zero-stability of the 3-step BDF-method on grids with variable stepsize for the numerical solution of IVPs for ODEs. Our approach is based on the theory of the spectral radius of a family of matrices and yields almost optimal results, which give a slight improvement to the best results already known from the literature. The success got on the chosen example suggests that our approach has a good potential for more general and harder stability analyses of numerical methods.