Construction of new soliton-like solutions for the (2 + 1) dimensional KdV equation with variable coefficients

By the application of the extended tanh method and the symbolic computation system-Mathematica, new soliton-like solutions are obtained for the 2D KdV equation with variable coefficients, under a constraint condition. In addition, new soliton-like solutions for the generalized Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation are obtained in case of degeneracy of the 2D KdV equation. © 2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd.