Families of continuous approximate processes for the solution of ordinary differential equations (Q1118992)

An explicit 6-stage Runge-Kutta method is presented, where some of the coefficient depend on a real parameter c. This method allows to compute a continuous approximation to the solution \(y(x_ 0+\theta h)\) of \(y'=f(x,y)\), which is of order 5 for \(\theta =c\) and of order 4 everywhere else. Usually c will be chosen as \(c=1\). However, if the approximation to \(y(x_ 0+h)\) does not satisfy the error criterion, it is suggested to take the formula with a smaller c. As the first 4 stages are independent of c, this makes step rejections cheaper.