Stability implications of delay distribution for first-order and second-order systems (Q964040)

In application areas, such as biology, physics and engineering, delays arise naturally because of the time it takes for the system to react to internal or external events. Often the associated mathematical model features more than one delay which are then weighted by some distribution function. The paper considers the effect of the delay distribution on the asymptotic stability of the zero solution of functional differential equations -- the corresponding mathematical models. The authors first show that the asymptotic stability of the zero solution of a first-order scalar equation with symmetrically distributed delays follows from the stability of the corresponding equation where the delay is fixed and given by the mean of the distribution. This result completes a proof of a stability condition in [\textit{S. Bernard, J. Bélair}, and \textit{M. C. Mackey}, Discrete Contin. Dyn. Syst., Ser. B 1, No.~2, 233--256 (2001; Zbl 0993.34065)], which was motivated in turn by an application from biology. They also discuss the corresponding case of second-order scalar delay differential equations, because they arise in physical systems that involve oscillating components. An example shows that it is not possible to give a general result for the second-order case. Namely, the boundaries of the stability regions of the distributed-delay equation and of the mean-delay equation may intersect even if the distribution is symmetric.