Numerical study for multi-strain tuberculosis (TB) model of variable-order fractional derivatives

In this paper, we presented a novel multi-strain TB model of variable-order fractional derivatives, which incorporates three strains: drug-sensitive, emerging multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant (XDR), as an extension for multi-strain TB model of nonlinear ordinary differential equations which developed in 2014 by Arino and Soliman [1]. Numerical simulations for this variable-order fractional model are the main aim of this work, where the variable-order fractional derivative is defined in the sense of Grünwald–Letnikov definition. Two numerical methods are presented for this model, the standard finite difference method (SFDM) and nonstandard finite difference method (NSFDM). Numerical comparison between SFDM and NSFDM is presented. It is concluded that, NSFDM preserves the positivity of the solutions and numerically stable in large regions than SFDM.