A survey on free boundary identification of the truncated boundary in numerical BVPs on infinite intervals

A free boundary formulation for the numerical solution of boundary value problems on infinite intervals was proposed recently in Fazio (SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 33 (1996) 1473). We consider here a survey on recent developments related to the free boundary identification of the truncated boundary. The goals of this survey are: to recall the reasoning for a free boundary identification of the truncated boundary, to report on a comparison of numerical results obtained for a classical test problem by three approaches available in the literature, and to propose some possible ways to extend the free boundary approach to the numerical solution of problems defined on the whole real line.