Three numerical methods have been used to solve two problems described by advection-diffusion equations with specified initial and boundary conditions. The methods used are the third order upwind scheme [4], fourth order upwind scheme [4] and Non-Standard Finite Difference scheme (NSFD) [9]. We considered two test problems. The first test problem has steep boundary layers near x = 1 and this is challenging problem as many schemes are plagued by non-physical oscillation near steep boundaries [15]. Many methods suffer from computational noise when modelling the second test problem especially when the coefficient of diffusivity is very small for instance 0.01. We compute some errors, namely L 2 and L ∞ errors, dissipation and dispersion errors, total variation and the total mean square error for both problems and compare the computational time when the codes are run on a matlab platform. We then use the optimization technique devised by Appadu [1] to find the optimal value of the time step at a given value of the spatial step which minimizes the dispersion error and this is validated by some numerical experiments.