It was proposed by Professor Jeff R. Cash [1] from Imperial College London and Alan H. Karp from IBM Scientific Center.
The method is a member of the Runge–Kutta family of ODE solvers.
More specifically, it uses six function evaluations to calculate fourth- and fifth-order accurate solutions.
This error estimate is very convenient for adaptive stepsize integration algorithms.
Other similar integration methods are Fehlberg (RKF) and Dormand–Prince (RKDP).