Abstract
In this paper, we provide several generalizations of the Gronwall inequality and present their applications to prove the uniqueness of solutions for fractional differential equations with various derivatives.
MSC:26A33, 34A08.
Similar content being viewed by others
1 Introduction
The Gronwall inequality has an important role in numerous differential and integral equations. The classical form of this inequality is described as follows, cf. [1].
Theorem 1.1 For any ,
where , then
In particular, if is not decreasing, then
In recent years, an increasing number of Gronwall inequality generalizations have been discovered to address difficulties encountered in differential equations, cf. [2–7]. Among these generalizations, we focus on the works of Ye, Gao and Qian, Gong, Li, the generalized Gronwall inequality with Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative and the Hadamard derivative which are presented as follows.
Theorem 1.2 ([6])
For any ,
where all the functions are not negative and continuous. The constant . b is a bounded and monotonic increasing function on , then
Theorem 1.3 ([5])
For any ,
where all the functions are not negative and continuous. The constant . b is a bounded and monotonic increasing function on , then
The aforementioned inequalities are obtained using the estimation method of the composition operators. This method is usually applied in studying qualitative theory of fractional differential equations. However, this method is not suitable for more complex situations. Therefore, we shall use a simpler technique to prove the main results obtained in this work.
Theorem 1.4 For any ,
where all the functions are not negative and continuous. The constants . () are the bounded and monotonic increasing functions on , then
Theorem 1.5 For any ,
where all the functions are not negative and continuous. The constants . () are the bounded and monotonic increasing functions on , then
2 The proof of the main results
In this section, we use the following critical lemmas to prove our main results.
Lemma 2.1 For any ,
where all the functions are continuous. The constants . () are the bounded, not negative, and monotonic increasing functions on , then , .
Proof Obviously, . If the proposition is false, that is,
where Φ is an empty set, then a number exists on which satisfies , . H is a strictly monotonic decreasing function on . Here, . Therefore, for any , and
which implies that
Let , then we have a contradiction, that is, . This process completes the proof of Lemma 2.1. □
The next lemma is given following the same method as for the previous lemma. The proving process is relatively similar, thus we do not include it in this paper.
Lemma 2.2 For any ,
where all the functions are continuous. The constants . () are the bounded, not negative, and monotonic increasing functions on , then , .
Our next task is proving our main results. To prove Theorem 1.4, we initially suppose that
Then, the following equality is given:
This equality, combined with the fact that () are the monotonic increasing functions on , yields
which indicates that
Let , then we obtain
According to Lemma 2.1, . That is, and . This process completes the proof of Theorem 1.4.
We can prove Theorem 1.5 by applying Lemma 2.2 in the same manner as in the previous theorem. We conclude the main results of this work.
3 Applications
In this section, we apply the main results of this work to demonstrate the uniqueness of the solution for fractional differential equations. First, the following initial value problems with the Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative are considered:
where , , and denote the Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative and fractional integral operators, respectively.
The β th Riemann-Liouville-type fractional order integral of a function is defined by
where and Γ is the gamma function.
Definition 3.2 ([9, 10, 12–14])
For any , the β th Riemann-Liouville-type fractional order derivative of a function is defined by
For any ,
where c is a constant in ℝ.
Lemma 3.2 ([15])
For any ,
We can then state the next theorem.
Theorem 3.1 For any , suppose that , and is a bounded and monotonic increasing function. If initial value problem (3.1) has a solution, then the solution is unique.
Proof Since , then according to Lemma 3.1, we can suppose that
where , , are some constants. This equality, combined with Lemma 3.2, enables us to change problem (3.1) into the following:
Therefore,
That is,
which implies that
If and are two solutions to problem (3.1), then they also satisfy the above equality. Thus we have
According to Theorem 1.4, we can conclude that
which indicates that
This process completes the proof of Theorem 3.1. □
Next, we study the uniqueness of the solution for the following initial value problems with the Hadamard-type fractional derivative:
where , . For any , and are defined as follows:
From [16], we obtain
where , , are some constants. Therefore,
When the aforementioned equality is plugged into problem (3.4), we obtain
This equality, combined with Theorem 1.5, can derive the next theorem. The procedure is relatively similar to the proof of Theorem 3.1, thus we do not include it in this paper.
Theorem 3.2 For any , suppose that , and is a bounded and monotonic increasing function. If initial value problem (3.2) has a solution, then the solution is unique.
4 Concluding remarks
In this work, we have obtained generalizations of the Gronwall inequality using several mathematical techniques. In addition, we have listed the initial value problems, namely (3.1) and (3.2), and proved the uniqueness of solutions to these problems by applying the generalized Gronwall inequalities.
References
Corduneanu C: Principles of Differential and Integral Equations. Allyn & Bacon, Boston; 1971.
Abdeldaim A, Yakout M: On some new integral inequalities of Gronwall-Bellman-Pachpatte type. Appl. Math. Comput. 2011, 217: 7887–7899. 10.1016/j.amc.2011.02.093
Feng Q, Zheng B: Generalized Gronwall-Bellman-type delay dynamic inequalities on time scales and their applications. Appl. Math. Comput. 2012, 218: 7880–7892. 10.1016/j.amc.2012.02.006
Li L, Meng F, He L: Some generalized integral inequalities and their applications. J. Math. Anal. Appl. 2010, 372: 339–349. 10.1016/j.jmaa.2010.06.042
Qian, D, Gong, Z, Li, C: A generalized Gronwall inequality and its application to fractional differential equations with Hadamard derivatives. http://nsc10.cankaya.edu.tr/proceedings/PAPERS/Symp2-Fractional%20Calculus%20Applications/Paper26.pdf.
Ye H, Gao J, Ding Y: A generalized Gronwall inequality and its application to a fractional differential equation. J. Math. Anal. Appl. 2007, 328: 1075–1081. 10.1016/j.jmaa.2006.05.061
Ye H, Gao J: Henry-Gronwall type retarded integral inequalities and their applications to fractional differential equations with delay. Appl. Math. Comput. 2011, 218: 4125–4160.
Ahmad B, Ntouyas S, Alsaedi A: New existence results for nonlinear fractional differential equations with three-point integral boundary conditions. Adv. Differ. Equ. 2011., 2011: Article ID 107384
Benchohra M, Hamani S, Ntouyas S: Boundary value problems for differential equations with fractional order. Surv. Math. Appl. 2008, 3: 1–12.
Feng M, Liu X, Feng H: The existence of positive solution to a nonlinear fractional differential equation with integral boundary conditions. Adv. Differ. Equ. 2011., 2011: Article ID 546038
Furati K, Tatar N: An existence result for a nonlocal fractional differential problem. J. Fract. Calc. 2004, 26: 43–51.
Lv Z, Liang J, Xiao T: Solutions to fractional differential equations with nonlocal initial condition in Banach spaces. Adv. Differ. Equ. 2010., 2010: Article ID 340349
Momani S, Jameel A, Azawi S: Local and global uniqueness theorems on fractional integro-differential equations via Bihari’s and Gronwall’s inequalities. Soochow J. Math. 2007, 33(4):619–627.
Lv Z: Positive solutions of m -point boundary value problems for fractional differential equations. Adv. Differ. Equ. 2011., 2011: Article ID 571804
Dixit S, Singh O, Kumar S: An analytic algorithm for solving system of fractional differential equations. J. Mod. Methods Numer. Math. 2010, 1(1):12–26.
Kilbas A, Srivastava H, Trujillo J: Theory and Applications of Fractional Differential Equations. Elsevier, Amsterdam; 2006.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11226167 and 11361020), the Natural Science Foundation of Hainan Province (No. 111005) and the Ph.D. Scientific Research Starting Foundation of Hainan Normal University (No. HSBS1016).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Competing interests
The author declares that they have no competing interests.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
About this article
Cite this article
Lin, Sy. Generalized Gronwall inequalities and their applications to fractional differential equations. J Inequal Appl 2013, 549 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/1029-242X-2013-549
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1029-242X-2013-549