Stochastic functional differential equations and applications

• Main Author: Rassias, Stamatiki
• Published: University of Strathclyde 2008
• Subjects: 510
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.486536

The general truth that the principle of causality, that is, the future state of a system is independent of its past history, cannot support all the cases under consideration, leads to the introduction of the FDEs. However, the strong need of modelling real life problems, demands the inclusion of stochasticity. Thus, the appearance of the SFDEs (special case of which is the SDDEs) is necessary and definitely unavoidable. It has been almost a century since Langevin's model that the researchers incorporate noise terms into their work. Two of the main research interests are linked with the existence and uniqueness of the solution of the pertinent SFDE/SDDE which describes the problem under consideration, and the qualitative behaviour of the solution. This thesis, explores the SFDEs and their applications. According to the scientific literature, Ito's work (1940) contributed fundamentally into the formulation and study of the SFDEs. Khasminskii (1969), introduced a powerful test for SDEs to have non-explosion solutions without the satisfaction of the linear growth condition. Mao (2002), extended the idea so as to approach the SDDEs. However, Mao's test cannot be applied in specific types of SDDEs. Through our research work we establish an even more general Khasminskii-type test for SDDEs which covers a wide class of highly non-linear SDDEs. Following the proof of the non-explosion of the pertinent solution, we focus onto studying its qualitative behaviour by computing some moment and almost sure asymptotic estimations. In an attempt to apply and extend our theoretical results into real life problems we devote a big part of our research work into studying two very interesting problems that arise : from the area of the population dynamks and from·a problem related to the physical phenomenon of ENSO (EI Nino - Southern Oscillation)