Parameter estimation over the Internet for ODEs in a chemical reaction model : In Fortran 90, Matlab and Mathematica

Many types of scientific and other problems, in industry or academia, can be solved over the Internet, but the use of this computing mode has, in our opinion, been marginal. We present an illustration of such mode by applying it to an illustrative problem in chemical reactions from the literature, which would benefit from this approach. We review the solution of the problem and present it on one of our web pages. Essentially, a system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) that describes the evolution of a particular reaction is solved and optimized. This is based on a Fortran 90 program executable in a dedicated web page, in PHP. In addition, Matlab and Mathematica scripts are made available. The application runs on the Linux server of the university, as might be of a company, and, in our typical practice, needs no installation or plug-ins on the user's terminal. We thus intend to: provide a public solution to a certain type of problem; supply the above scripts; and advocate the Internet as a convenient computing medium. A number of other problems can be freely solved on the authors' web pages.