Bespoke finite difference schemes that preserve multiple conservation laws

Conservation laws provide important constraints on the solutions of partial differential equations (PDEs), therefore it is important to preserve them when discretizing such equations. In this paper, a new systematic method for discretizing a PDE, so as to preserve the local form of multiple conservation laws, is presented. The technique, which uses symbolic computation, is applied to the Korteweg–de Vries (KdV) equation to find novel explicit and implicit schemes that have finite difference analogues of its first and second conservation laws and its first and third conservation laws. The resulting schemes are numerically compared with a multisymplectic scheme.