Smoothing transformation and spline collocation for weakly singular Volterra integro-differential equations

This work is concerned with the construction and analysis of high order numerical methods for solving initial value problems for linear Volterra integro-differential equations with different types of singularities. Using an integral reformulation of the initial value problem, a smoothing transformation is applied so that the exact solution of the resulting equation does not contain any singularities in its derivatives up to a certain order. After that, the regularized equation is solved by a piecewise polynomial collocation method on a uniform or mildly graded grid. Finally, the obtained spline approximations can be used to define (typically non-polynomial) approximations for the initial value problem. The theoretical results are tested by some numerical examples.