TRACE-DDE: a Tool for Robust Analysis and Characteristic Equations for Delay Differential Equations

In the recent years the authors developed numerical schemes to detect the stability properties of different classes of systems involving delayed terms. The base of all methods is the use of pseudospectral differentiation techniques in order to get numerical approximations of the relevant characteristic eigenvalues. This chapter is aimed to present the freely available Mat lab package TRACE-DDE devoted to the computation of characteristic roots and stability charts of linear autonomous systems of delay differential equations with discrete and distributed delays and to resume the main features of the underlying pseudospectral approach.