Age-time discontinuous Galerkin method for the Lotka-McKendrick equation

Abstract

The Lotka-McKendrick equation which describes the evolution of a single population under the phenomenological conditions is developed from the well-known Malthus' model. In this paper, we introduce the Lotka-McKendrick equation for the description of the dynamics of a population. We apply a discontinuous Galerkin finite element method in age-time domain to approximate the solution of the system. We provide some numerical results. It is experimentally shown that, when the mortality function is bounded, the scheme converges at the rate of $h^{2}$ in the case of piecewise linear polynomial space. It is also shown that the scheme converges at the rate of $h^{3/2}$ when the mortality function is unbounded.