Monotonicity and discretization of Urysohn integral operators (Q2247122)

In nonlinear analysis, the property that a nonlinear operator on a Banach space preserves an order relation, is subhomogeneous or order concave relative to an order cone, is important from many perspectives. For instance, it permits a fixed point or a monotone iterative technique to be applied to solve certain nonlinar equations. It is known that, in Dynamical Systems, this property simplifies the study of long term behavior of associated integrodifference equations. In this work, the authors present sufficient conditions for vector-valued Urysohn integral operators to be monotone, subhomogeneous or concave. Conditions guaranteeing that these properties are preserved under spatial discretization of particularly Nyström type, are also obtained. This latter fact has important implications for numerical schemes to converge, or for simulations to reproduce the actual behavior and asymptotics.