The recently developed Flexible Local Approximation MEthod (FLAME) produces
accurate difference schemes by replacing the usual Taylor expansion with
Trefftz functions -- local solutions of the underlying differential equation.
This paper advances and casts in a general form a significant modification of
FLAME proposed recently by Pinheiro & Webb: a least-squares fit instead of the
exact match of the approximate solution at the stencil nodes. As a consequence
of that, FLAME schemes can now be generated on irregular stencils with the
number of nodes substantially greater than the number of approximating
functions. The accuracy of the method is preserved but its robustness is
improved. For demonstration, the paper presents a number of numerical examples
in 2D and 3D: electrostatic (magnetostatic) particle interactions, scattering
of electromagnetic (acoustic) waves, and wave propagation in a photonic
crystal. The examples explore the role of the grid and stencil size, of the
number of approximating functions, and of the irregularity of the stencils.Comment: 28 pages, 12 figures; to be published in J Comp Phy