Copyright © 2013 Rabha W. Ibrahim and Hamid A. Jalab. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

It is well known that the complex step method is a tool that calculates derivatives by imposing a complex step in a strict sense. We extended the method by employing the fractional calculus differential operator in this paper. The fractional calculus can be taken in the sense of the Caputo operator, Riemann-Liouville operator, and so forth. Furthermore, we derived several approximations for computing the fractional order derivatives. Stability of the generalized fractional complex step approximations is demonstrated for an analytic test function.