phaseR: An R package for phase plane analysis of autonomous ODE systems

Abstract

When modelling physical systems, analysts will frequently be confronted by differential equations which cannot be solved analytically. In this instance, numerical integration will usually be the only way forward. However, for autonomous systems of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) in one or two dimensions, it is possible to employ an instructive qualitative analysis foregoing this requirement, using so-called phase plane methods. Moreover, this qualitative analysis can even prove to be highly useful for systems that can be solved analytically, or will be solved numerically anyway. The package phaseR allows the user to perform such phase plane analyses: determining the stability of any equilibrium points easily, and producing informative plots.

Publication
The R Journal 2014; 6(2):43-51

Supplementary details

The current release of the R package discussed in this article is available on CRAN here. It can be installed in R using

install.packages("phaseR")

A development version is available on GitHub here. It can be installed in R with

devtools::install_github("mjg211/phaseR")

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