Relationship between vanishing splitting errors and pairwise commutativity (Q2472814)

The authors discuss additive operator splittings for the time propagation of abstract Cauchy problems. The question whether the commutativity relations which are well known to be sufficient for the local error to vanish are also necessary is addressed. In contrast to the first order Lie--Trotter splitting, the question is answered to the negative for the symmetric second order Strang splitting, as well as for sequential splittings with more than two sub-operators and certain weighted splittings.