Generalized double integral inequalities and their applications in studying the stability of nonlinear integro-differential systems with time delay (Q372896)

A Gronwall type inequality for weighted iterated integrals is proved, a nonlinear autonomous superposition operator being allowed in the integral. More precisely, it is shown that an implicit inequality of the form \[ 0\leq u(t)\leq b(t)+\int_0^tf(t,s)\omega(u(s))+ \int_0^th(t,s)\omega(u(s))\int_0^sk(s,v)\omega(u(v))dv\,ds \] for \(u\) (with nonnegative given functions satisfying certain smoothness and monotonicity conditions) implies an explicit estimate for \(u(t)\) under some assumptions about some associated auxiliary quantities. The ``linear'' case \(\omega(u)=u\) is not excluded. The result is applied to show that differential equations with a delay tending to \(0\) as \(t\to0\) or integro-differential equations with such a delay are uniformly stable, provided the nonlinearities satisfy an ``integrable'' sublinear estimate \(\| f(t,x)\|\leq a(t)\| x\|\) with \(a\in L^1([0,\infty))\), or a similar estimate with an associated finite iterated integral, respectively.