Abstract
The objective of this manuscript is to investigate the existence, uniqueness criteria and Ulam–Hyers stability of solutions to tripled systems of the Hilfer–Hadamard type supplemented with symmetric nonlocal multi-point Riemann–Liouville integral boundary conditions. By converting the considered problem into an equivalent fixed-point problem, the existence and uniqueness are proven by application of the Leray–Schauder nonlinear alternative and Banach’s contraction principle, respectively. In addition, we discuss the Ulam–Hyers stability and generalized Ulam–Hyers stability of the results, and illustrative examples are also presented to demonstrate their correctness and effectiveness.
1. Introduction
In recent decades, fractional differential equations have been considered as flexible tools for modeling complex systems that exhibit memory and inheritance properties due to the fact that these equations involve several types of fractional derivatives. These derivatives differ in type and complement each other regarding performance, which makes differential equations more flexible with regard to scientific interpretability and the accuracy of the mathematics []. Riemann–Liouville, Caputo, and Hadamard derivatives are considered the most famous fractional derivatives []. However, the need for generalizations of these derivatives emerged when Hilfer studied fractional time evaluation in [,]. Consequently, in [], Hilfer introduced a new generalized derivative known as the Hilfer fractional derivative of type . This derivative interpolates between the Riemann–Liouville and Caputo fractional derivatives when differs from its smallest to the largest value, respectively. Many researchers are currently focused on utilizing this new derivative in various applications, as seen in [,].
The generalization of fractional derivatives is not limited to traditional derivatives, but can also be extended to include an important type of fractional derivative which is unique according to its logarithmic kernel, that is, the Hadamard derivative. Therefore, in 2012, a new combination of Hilfer and Hadamard fractional derivatives was presented by Qasim [], known as the Hilfer–Hadamard fractional derivative of type. When the value of the parameter differs from 0 to 1, the Hilfer derivative and Caputo–Hadamard derivative, respectively, are special cases of the Hilfer–Hadamard fractional derivative []. The authors of [] applied this new type of derivative to RLC circuit models, while the authors in [] studied the Hilfer–Hadamard Langevin system.
The study of value problems involving the Hilfer–Hadamard fractional derivative has garnered significant attention. Researchers have explored theoretical studies of Hilfer–Hadamard fractional differential equations by utilizing various fixed-point theorems and examining their stability. For instance, Tudorache et al. [] investigated a sequential coupled system of Hilfer–Hadamard fractional differential equations with symmetric Hadamard integral boundary conditions. For some studies on Hilfer–Hadamard fractional differential equations, we refer the reader to [,] and the references therein. In a variant way, the authors of [] combined a sequential coupled system of Hilfer–Hadamard integro differential equations with Riemann–Liouville integral boundary conditions, expanding the existing literature on Hilfer–Hadamard derivatives by combining operators that differ in their kernels.
Recently, tripled systems of fractional differential equations, a generalization of coupled fractional systems, have gained more attention due to their applications. For instance, in bio-mathematics, many epidemic models consist of tripled systems, exemplified in [,], which can be improved by fractional derivatives, as summarized in the review article [] and discussed in details in the works [,]. The authors of [,] established theoretical concepts of the tripled fixed point. As a result, many researchers have been interested in the existence criteria of such systems, especially in the Riemann–Liouville or Caputo sense, and have applied different fixed-point theorems. For instance, the tripled systems presented in [,] have fractional orders in the same domain, which allowed the authors to use Krasnoselskii’s theorem to establish the existence results for the considered problems. Alternatively, in [], Darbo’s fixed point was used to confirm the existence results, while the authors of [] used the Mawhin’s topological degree theory method to derive sufficient conditions for existence and the author of [,,] applied the Leray–Schauder nonlinear alternative.
Inspired by the above discussion, in this study, we extend the work in [] and the tripled system in [] to present the following tripled system of Hilfer–Hadamard differential equations of different fractional orders and of type :
supplemented with the following symmetric nonlocal multi-point Riemann–Liouville integral boundary conditions:
where In the problem (1) and (2), we consider to be the Riemann–Liouville fractional integral operator of positive fractional order , while are continuous functions, and are nonzero real constants. We establish the criteria for the existence and uniqueness of the solutions of the presented problem by applying standard fixed-point theorems. In addition, we also study the stability issue for the problem (1) and (2) in the Ulam–Hyers sense.
In our manuscript, we aim to enrich the research area on tripled systems by considering Hilfer–Hadamard derivatives with different orders, which, to the best of our knowledge, have not been previously discussed. Moreover, we combine the considered fractional equations with symmetric boundary conditions involving multi-point Riemann–Liouville integrals. It is worth mentioning the importance of the symmetric integral boundary conditions, which are widely used for studying models with long-term memory or nonlocal interactions; see [,], for instance.
Here, we note that the most common methodology for studying Hilfer–Hadamard fractional differential equations is to combine them using boundary conditions involving Hadamard operators, see, for example, the works [,]. However, the problem (1) and (2) is entirely different and, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first work of its kind in the literature.
Our manuscript is organized as follows: In Section 2, we introduce the necessary mathematical background and basic tools required for our analysis. The main results on the existence and uniqueness of solutions for the considered problem are presented in Section 3, and Section 4 deals with Hyers–Ulam stability. In the last section, we discuss the validity of our results using illustrative examples.
2. Auxiliary Results
Firstly, we introduce some important definitions.
Definition 1
([]). The left-sided Riemann–Liouville fractional integral of order is defined by
where and denotes the Gamma function.
Definition 2
([]). The left-sided Hadamard fractional integral of positive order ρ is given by
where is a continuous function and .
Definition 3
([]). Let be a continuous function. The left-sided Hadamard fractional derivative of order is defined by
where is the integer part of the real number ρ.
Definition 4
([]). Assume that and . Then, the left-sided Caputo–Hadamard fractional derivative of order ρ of h is defined by
where the symbol denotes the Hadamard integral defined by Definition 2.
Lemma 1
([]). Assume that . We have
As a special case, if , we have
Definition 5
([]). Assume that , and . Then, the left-sided Hilfer–Hadamard fractional derivative of order ρ and type is defined by
where , , and are defined in Definitions 2 and 3, respectively.
Remark 1
Theorem 1
([]). Assume that , , and such that , , , . Then, the following is satisfied
such that for all , and , the value of exists.
Definition 6
([]). An element is called a tripled fixed point of a mapping if , and .
Define an operator : such that
Then, () is a tripled fixed point of T iff () is a fixed point of ; that is, .
In the following lemma, we solve the linear form of the problem (1) and (2), which transforms it to a fixed-point problem.
Lemma 2.
Let and , where
3. Existence and Uniqueness Results
Let be a Banach space equipped with the norm defined by . Then, is also a Banach space endowed with the norm .
In light of Lemma 2, we define the operator by
where
and
We set the following notation:
where
with , , and .
In the following result, we apply the Leray–Schauder alternative [] to establish the existence of solutions to the problem (1) and (2) on .
Theorem 2.
Let , where Δ is defined in (27). We assume that:
are continuous functions and there exist real constants and such that for all and ,
Proof.
It is clear that the continuity of the operator follows from that of the functions and h. Thus, let be bounded so that for all , we have
where and are positive constants. Then, for any , we get
Using the notation in (31), we find that
Similarly, we can find that
and
Based on inequalities (36)–(38), we must obtain
where are defined in (31). This proves the uniform boundedness of .
Next, we prove that is equicontinuous. Let such that . Then, we get
Similarly, we can obtain
and
Since inequalities (40)–(42) do not depend on , or and tend to zero as , we conclude that the operator is equicontinuous and, consequently, completely continuous.
Finally, we prove that the set is bounded.
Let be with for any . Then, by , we get
In the same manner, we find that
and
By adding inequalities (43)–(45) and using the notations in (31), we can alternatively find that
where and is defined in (34). Thus, the set is bounded. Using the Leray–Schauder alternative [], we conclude that there is at least one fixed point for the operator . As a consequence, problem (1) and (2) has at least one solution on . The proof is complete. □
In the following result, we apply the contraction mapping principle [] to prove the uniqueness of the solution to the considered problem.
Theorem 3.
Let , where . Moreover, we suppose that:
Proof.
Let us define and such that
First, we prove that such that . For any , using assumption , we have
Similarly, we can obtain
and
In the same way, we get
and
Based on inequalities (49) and (54)–(56),we find that
which guarantees that . Now, for any and , we obtain
Using assumption , we get
which implies that
Similarly, we can get
and
4. Stability Analysis
In this section, we discuss the stability of the solution to system (1) with the conditions in (2). We consider two types of stability: Ulam–Hyers stability and generalized Ulam–Hyers stability.
Consider the following system of inequalities:
where are given positive real numbers.
Remark 2.
For the stability analysis, we first state the following definitions for the Ulam–Hyers stability of the considered problem (1) and (2) as follows:
Definition 7
Definition 8
Theorem 4.
Proof.
Applying the notations in (31) and (32) with the aid of for any , we get the following inequalities:
and
By assumption , we can find that
In the same manner, we can obtain
and
Therefore, by adding inequalities (72)–(74), we get
where are defined in (31). Consequently, we have
where
Hence, the problem (1) and (2) is Ulam–Hyers stable. Furthermore, we can define a function
where the constant vector is defined in (78). Since the function vanishes only when , then the problem (1) and (2) is generalized Ulam–Hyers stable, since
This completes the proof. □
5. Applications
This section supports our results with illustrative examples.
Example 1.
Consider the following tripled fractional differential system:
Here, and .
Using the above data, we can calculate all upper bounds defined in (32) as follows:
and .
In addition, the defined functions and h in (81) satisfy condition , with and .
Consequently, we find that
which shows that all values are still less than 1, which proves the existence of a solution to the problem (81) according to Theorem 2.
Example 2.
Consider the following Hilfer–Hadamard fractional differential system:
In addition, all defined functions and h in (83) satisfy condition () with .
Now, for , we will fix all values of the parameters and examine the results when changes, as shown in Table 1:
Table 1.
Numerical illustration of problem (83).
Table 1 shows the following:
- 1.
- 2.
- Since the value of Θ remains positive for different values of the fractional order , the problem (83) is Ulam–Hyers stable.
- 3.
- For nonzero ϵ, the problem (83) satisfies generalized Ulam–Hyers stability since the positivity of Θ implies the positivity of function .Therefore, the problem (83) has a unique solution.
6. Conclusions
We have ensured the existence and uniqueness of solutions to a tripled system of Hilfer–Hadamard type by applying Banach contraction mapping and the Leray–Schauder nonlinear alternative. In addition, we have proven the Ulam–Hyers stability of the studied system. We must emphasize that the results of the present work are new and interesting. Furthermore, the study of the Hilfer–Hadamard derivative is expansive and can be extended to more generalized operators. Indeed, for the continuous-time case, the manuscript’s problem can be formulated in the -Hilfer derivative since the Hilfer-Hadamard derivative is given as a special case when []. For the discrete-time, our manuscript can be formulated in the sense of Hilfer fractional difference equations [].
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, S.A. and H.A.; Methodology, S.A., H.A. and A.A.; Software, S.A. and A.A.; Validation, S.A., H.A. and A.A.; Formal Analysis, S.A., H.A. and A.A.; Writing—Original Draft Preparation, S.A., H.A. and A.A.; Writing—Review and Editing, S.A., H.A. and A.A. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This research was funded by the Deanship of Graduate Studies and Scientific Research, Taif University.
Data Availability Statement
The data are contained within the article.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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