RKLab provides a suite of Matlab files that implement adaptive-step explicit, implicit and ImEx Runge-Kutta methods. This software is designed for instructional use and has been implemented to be easily understood and modified. As a result, certain efficiency-related optimizations have been omitted.

We currently provide four classes of methods: (a) explicit Runge-Kutta (ERK), (b) diagonally-implicit Runge-Kutta (DIRK), and (c) mixed implicit-explicit additive Runge-Kutta (ARK), and (d) fully implicit Runge-Kutta (IRK).

In addition to these classes of methods, we provide a large number of Butcher tables (over 70), holding the coefficients for existing methods in each of these categories.

For ERK, DIRK and ARK methods, time step adaptivity is enabled for methods with embeddings (most of the included ERK, DIRK and ARK methods include embeddings). For IRK methods, time step adaptivity is performed using a Richardson error estimate (cost of 3 solves per step), but leverages the additional cost through using the Richardson extrapolation for the time step solution. All three classes of methods may be run in so-called "fixed-step mode", wherein the solver will take steps of a user-supplied magnitude.

In addition to these sets of solvers, we provide three example problems that may be used to test different methods, and that may be used as a template for creating new problems. These test problems include: (a) a non-stiff variant of the Van der Pol oscillator (two-component nonlinear ODE system). (b) a stiff Brusselator problem (three-component nonlinear ODE system), and (c) a PDE variant of the Brusselator problem (two-component nonlinear PDE system).

These codes require Matlab v2016b or newer.