An Adaptive Time Stepping Algorithm and Its Application to Platelet Aggregation Simulation

In this paper, we propose an adaptive strategy on the choice of time step size for the Velocity Verlet (VV) algorithm. The key idea here is to adjust the time step size adaptively according to the velocity and position of each pair of particles. The Adaptive Time Stepping Velocity Verlet (ATS-VV) algorithm is then applied to the Coarse Grained Molecular Dynamics (CGMD) simulation for the platelet aggregation process. Several numerical experiments show that the adaptive strategy not only enhances the efficiency of the standard VV algorithm, but also improves the fault-tolerant ability of the simulation program. In particular, our adaptive-time-step size simulation takes only time steps ranged from 0.7% to 19% of the standard VV algorithm with the same finest time step size.