A numerical method based on finite difference for boundary value problems for singularly perturbed delay differential equations

Abstract A boundary value problem for second order singularly perturbed delay differential equation is considered. When the delay argument is sufficiently small, to tackle the delay term, the researchers [M.K. Kadalbajoo, K.K. Sharma, Numerical analysis of singularly perturbed delay differential equations with layer behavior, Appl. Math. Comput. 157 (2004) 11–28, R.E. O’Malley, Jr., Singular Perturbation Methods for Ordinary Differential Equations, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1991] used Taylor’s series expansion and presented an asymptotic as well as numerical approach to solve such type boundary value problem. But the existing methods in the literature fail in the case when the delay argument is bigger one because in this case, the use of Taylor’s series expansion for the term containing delay may lead to a bad approximation. In this paper to short out this problem, we present a numerical scheme for solving such type of boundary value problems, which works nicely in both the cases, i.e., when delay argument is bigger one as well as smaller one. To handle the delay argument, we construct a special type of mesh so that the term containing delay lies on nodal points after discretization. The proposed method is analyzed for stability and convergence. To demonstrate the efficiency of the method and how the size of the delay argument and the coefficient of the delay term affects the layer behavior of the solution several test examples are considered.