A comparison of numerical solvers for stiff and hybrid system simulation

This paper presents a comparison of well-established numerical solvers in the context of numerical simulation, covering a broad variety of typical solver characteristics: four solvers integrated in the software tool Dymola (R) as well as the seven ODE solvers of Matlab (R)/Simulink (R). An evaluation is made by means of three benchmark tests. Therefore, the solvers are tested on three model types: a continuous, a stiff, and a stiff-hybrid model. Hereby, a wide range of tolerance settings is systematically covered. As a result, we give a survey of differing strengths and weaknesses of the tested solvers on the basis of four appropriate key traits: accuracy, velocity, compactness of results, and numerical efficiency.