Asymptotic behavior of solutions to a class of nonlinear evolution equations (Q1057470)

This paper is concerned with the asymptotic behavior of solutions to Cauchy problems of the following form formulated in a Hilbert space H: \[ (E)\quad -u'(t)\in \partial \phi^ t(u(t)),\quad t\in R_+=[0,\infty), \] where \(\phi^ t\) is a proper l.s.c. convex function on H and \(\partial \phi^ t\) denotes the subdifferential of \(\phi^ t\) in H. Under some assumptions imposed on the family \(\{\phi^ t\}_{t\geq 0}\) and the convergence \(\phi^ t\to \phi^{\infty}\) as \(t\to \infty\) in a certain sense, it is shown that the solution u(t) of (E) converges to an equilibrium point \(u_{\infty}\) as \(t\to \infty\) in the sense that \(u(t)\to u_{\infty}\) weakly (or strongly) in H as \(t\to \infty\) and \[ \lim_{t\to \infty}\phi^ t(u(t)) = \min \phi^{\infty} = \phi^{\infty}(u_{\infty}) \] (hence \(0\in \partial \phi^{\infty}(u_{\infty})).\) This abstract result is applied in order to investigate the equilibrium stability of solutions to a certain kind of parabolic variational inequalities with time-dependent obstacles.