Fractional Adams-Bashforth/Moulton methods: An application to the fractional Keller-Segel chemotaxis system

We first formulate a fractional class of explicit Adams-Bashforth (A-B) and implicit Adams-Moulton (A-M) methods of first- and second-order accuracy for the time-integration of (C)(0)D(t)(tau)u(x, t) = g(t; u), tau is an element of(0, 1], where D-C(0)t(tau) denotes the fractional derivative in the Caputo sense. In this fractional setting and in contrast to the standard Adams methods, an extra history load term emerges and the associated weight coefficients are tau-dependent. However when tau = 1, the developed schemes reduce to the well-known A-B and A-M methods with standard coefficients. Hence, in terms of scientific computing, our approach constitutes a minimal modification of the existing Adams libraries. Next, we develop an implicit-explicit (IMEX) splitting scheme for linear and nonlinear fractional PDEs of a general advection-reaction-diffusion type, and we apply our scheme to the time-space fractional Keller-Segel chemotaxis system. In this context, we evaluate the nonlinear advection term explicitly, employing the fractional A-B method in the prediction step, and we treat the corresponding diffusion term implicitly in the correction step using the fractional A-M scheme. Moreover, we perform the corresponding spatial discretization by employing an efficient and spectrally-accurate fractional spectral collocation method. Our numerical experiments exhibit the efficiency of the proposed IMEX scheme in solving nonlinear fractional PDEs. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.