1. Introduction
Fractional calculus and fractional differential equations have received substantial consideration owing to the broad applications of fractional derivative operators in mathematical modeling, describing many real-world processes more accurately than classical-order differential equations. For a systematic development of this topic, see [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7], while for an extensive study of fractional boundary value problems, see the monograph in [
8]. Usually, fractional derivative operators are defined with the help of fractional integral operators and Euler’s gamma function. There exists a variety of fractional derivative operators, such as Riemann–Liouville, Caputo, Erdélyi–Kober, Hadamard, Hilfer, Katugampola, etc. The
k-Riemann–Liouville fractional integral operator was defined in [
9], while the
k-Riemann–Liouville fractional derivative was introduced in [
10]. See [
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16] and the references cited therein for recent results regarding
k-Riemann–Liouville fractional derivative operators. The
-Riemann–Liouville integral and derivative fractional operators were introduced in [
2], while in [
17] and [
10], respectively, the
-Riemann–Liouville integral and derivative fractional operators were defined. The Hilfer fractional derivative, defined in [
18], extends both the Riemann–Liouville and Caputo fractional derivatives. The
-Hilfer fractional derivative was defined in [
19]. For applications of Hilfer fractional derivatives in mathematics, physics, etc., see [
20,
21,
22,
23,
24,
25,
26,
27,
28]. For recent results on boundary value problems for fractional differential equations and inclusions with Hilfer fractional derivatives, see the survey paper by Ntouyas in [
29].
In a series of papers, namely in [
30,
31,
32], some authors have studied existence and uniqueness results for Hilfer fractional differential equations subject to a variety of boundary conditions, including multipoint boundary conditions, non-local integral boundary conditions, non-local integro-multipoint boundary conditions, integro-multistrip–multipoint boundary conditions, Riemann–Stieltjes integral multistrip boundary conditions, etc. In all of the above-mentioned boundary value problems, in order for the solution to be well defined, a zero initial condition is required.
In [
33], the authors proposed a combination of Hilfer and Caputo fractional derivative operators, making it possible to investigate boundary value problems with a non-zero initial condition. They investigated a sequential fractional boundary value problem that contains a combination of Hilfer and Caputo fractional derivative operators and non-separated boundary conditions of the form
where
and
are the
-Hilfer fractional derivative and
-Caputo fractional derivative, respectively. Moreover,
,
is the Riemann–Liouville fractional integral of order
, with respect to a function
;
is a nonlinear continuous function;
is the Riemann–Stieltjes integral; and
is a function of bounded variation.
In the present paper, we continue the study this topic by extending the results of [
33] to cover coupled sequential fractional systems containing a combination of Hilfer and Caputo fractional derivative operators and non-separated boundary conditions of the form
where
and
with
,
, are the
-Hilfer fractional derivative and
-Caputo fractional derivative, respectively. Moreover,
with
,
are the Riemann–Liouville fractional integral of order
,
with respect to a function
, and
are nonlinear continuous functions.
We use fixed point theory to obtain our main results. Thus, by using the Banach’s fixed point theorem, we prove the uniqueness of the solution, while via the Leray–Schauder alternative, we establish an existence result. Furthermore, numerical examples are illustrated to support the theoretical analysis.
The novelty of the present study lies in the fact that we consider a combination of fractional derivative operators in the sense of Hilfer and Caputo, subjected to non-separated boundary conditions, which is a new topic of research. The method used is standard, but its configuration in the problem at hand is new. It is imperative to note that the proposed combination of Hilfer and Caputo fractional derivative operators of order
can be applied in other types of coupled boundary conditions, such as periodic, i.e.,
or separated, i.e.,
This paper is organized as follows: In
Section 2, we recall the basic definitions and lemmas needed to prove our results. We prove also a lemma concerning a linear variant of the problem (
2), which allows us to transform the nonlinear system (
2) into integral equations. In
Section 3, we prove our main results by using the Banach fixed point theorem as well as the Leray–Schauder alternative. In
Section 4, some numerical examples are constructed to illustrate the obtained theoretical results. This paper closes with some concluding remarks.
2. Preliminaries
In this section, we recall some definitions, lemmas, and remarks that are used later in this paper.
Definition 1 ([
2])
. Assume that and and with for all . Then, is defined bywhere is the Euler gamma function, and is called the ϕ-Riemann–Liouville fractional integral of the function g with respect to ϕ of order Definition 2 ([
19])
. Let , and . Then,is called the ϕ-Hilfer fractional derivative of order of the function g with a parameter In addition, the ϕ-Hilfer operator can be written aswhere is the ϕ-Riemann–Liouville fractional operator and . Definition 3 ([
34])
. The ϕ-Caputo fractional derivative of order of a function g is presented aswhere , and while the ϕ-Riemann–Liouville fractional derivative is defined by interchanging between two operators in (4) as Remark 1 ([
35])
. The parameters satisfyandwhere is an order of Hilfer operator and is an interpolated value between the Riemann–Liouville and Caputo differential operators. Lemma 1 ([
19])
. For the constants , and , we have- (i)
- (ii)
- (iii)
In the following lemma, we denote by the k-times absolutely continuous functions on .
Lemma 2 ([
19])
. Let , , , , , . Then, we havewhere and In the following lemma, a linear variant of the sequential fractional Hilfer–Caputo system (
2) is studied. We will use this lemma in defining the integral operators used in our theorems.
Lemma 3. Let and be such thatand Then, are solutions of the Hilfer–Caputo fractional linear systemif and only if satisfy the integral equationsand Proof. Since
, by taking the fractional integral operator
on both sides of the first and second equations in (6) and using Lemma 2, we obtain
and
where
and
. Now, by taking the fractional integral
on both sides of the equations (9), (10) and applying Lemma 1, since
we obtain
and
Now, combining the boundary conditions
with (11) and (12), we obtain
By
and
we obtain
From Equations (14) and (16), we have
From Equations (13) and (15), we have
Replacing the values , and in (11) and (12), we obtain the solutions (7) and (8).
Conversely, we will show that
and
expressed in (7) and (8) satisfy the non-separated boundary value problem (6). Firstly, from
,
,
, and by applying the operators
and
to (7) and (8), respectively, we obtain
and
using the fact that the Caputo derivative of a constant is zero. In the next step, since
we take the operators
and
into the above two equations, respectively. We consider the term
and, similarly,
. According to Lemma 1
,
and
satisfy the first two fractional differential equations in the boundary value problem (6). In the final step, we show that
and
satisfy the boundary conditions of (6). Taking the
-Caputo fractional derivative of orders
and
into (7) and (8), respectively, since
, we obtain
and
Putting the values
and
in (7) and (8) and in the above two equations, we can find that
and
satisfy the boundary conditions in (6). Therefore, the proof is completed. □
3. Main Results
We denote that the space of all continuous functions
from
to
by
X endowed with the sup-norm
is a Banach space. The product space
is a Banach space with norm
for
In view of Lemma 3, we define an operator
by
where
and
where we used the notations
and
For computational convenience, we set some notations of constants
The uniqueness of the solution of the system (
2) is proved in the next theorem by using the classical contraction fixed point theorem according to Banach [
36].
Theorem 1. Let be such that for
- ,
there exists , such thatfor all and , .
Ifwhere are defined by (19), then there exists a unique solution to the system (2) over the interval . Proof. Denote
and
with
Using
for all
we have
and, similarly,
We will show that
For all
, we have
Hence,
Consequently,
and, therefore,
.
Again, making use of
we have
Similarly, we obtain
Next, we will show that the operator
is a contraction. For
we have
which implies
In a similar way, we obtain
Consequently, it follows that
According to the given assumption in (20),
, and thus
is a contraction. Therefore, using Banach’s fixed point theorem, the fractional Hilfer–Caputo sequential system (
2) has a unique solution on
. □
Next, we prove an existence result for the fractional Hilfer–Caputo sequential system (
2) via the Leray–Schauder alternative [
37].
Theorem 2. Let be continuous. Moreover, we assume that for
- ,
there exists real constants and , such that for all , , we have
Then, the fractional Hilfer–Caputo sequential system (2) has at least one solution on provided that Proof. First of all, we show that the operator is completely continuous. Notice that, since the functions are continuous, the operator is continuous.
Let
For any
we have
Similarly, we obtain
For any
we have, as in Theorem 1,
and
and hence
which means that the operator
is uniformly bounded.
Now, we want to show that
is equicontinuous. Let
with
. Then, for all
, we have
This implies that
as
independently of
. In a similar way,
independently of
. Hence, using the Arzelá–Ascoli theorem, the equicontinuity of the operator
is proved.
It remains to show that the set
is bounded. Let
; then,
for some
, and for any
, we have
As in the first step, for all
, we obtain
From the above inequalities, we have
This implies that the set
is bounded. Therefore, according to the Leray–Schauder alternative, the fractional Hilfer–Caputo sequential system (
2) has on
at least one solution. □
4. Examples
In this section, a coupled system of mixed fractional Hilfer and Caputo integro-differential equations with non-separated boundary conditions, by varying the nonlinear functions containing fractional integrals of unknown functions, can be considered to be of the following form:
From this information, we set , , , , , , , , , , , and . Then, we can show that , , , , , and . In addition, by using the Maple program, we find that , , , , , , , , , .
Case
I. Consider the nonlinear functions
, defined by
Let us see that for all
,
Since
, for
the above equation exists by the Leibniz fundamental rule of calculus, and then
,
. Next, for all
, we have
which exists on
and it is also integrable on
.
In this case, we see that
,
and then we have
and
. In addition, we can show that the
in (22) satisfy
and
with
and
. From all of these details, we can find that
and thus the inequality in (20) in Theorem 1 is fulfilled. This means that, according to Theorem 1, the coupled system of mixed fractional Hilfer and Caputo integro-differential equations with non-separated boundary conditions (21) with
defined in (22) has a unique solution
for
.
Case
. Now, we consider the functions
, expressed by
Using a method similar to that used in
, we can show that
,
and
,
. From (23), we set
and
, which lead to
and
. Note that
do not satisfy the Lipschitz condition, but
and
Thus, we choose
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
. Then, we obtain
Therefore, from all setting constants, we obtain
Hence, by applying Theorem 2, the separated boundary value problem (21) with defined in (23) has at least one solution on the interval .
5. Conclusions
In the present research, a sequential coupled system of fractional differential equations combining Hilfer and Caputo fractional derivative operators, supplemented with non-separated boundary conditions, was investigated. We applied the method proposed recently by the authors in [
33], where a sequential fractional boundary value problem with non-separated boundary conditions was studied. The proposed combination gives us the possibility to discuss sequential coupled systems of fractional differential equations combining Hilfer and Caputo fractional derivative operators subjected to non-zero initial conditions. We emphasize that the combination of Hilfer and Caputo fractional derivative operators allows us to study non-separated boundary conditions with non-zero initial conditions, while the combination of Caputo and Hilfer fractional derivative operators requires zero initial conditions. Indeed, if the sequential fractional differential equation in (6) is interchanged as
then we have
where
. Since
, we have
when
. This means that the initial condition
is necessary for the fractional differential Equation (24). The main existence and uniqueness results have been proven in this paper by using the Banach fixed point theorem and the Leray–Schauder alternative. Furthermore, some examples have been illustrated to support our theoretical analysis.
To obtain the main results, fixed point theorems were used, namely the Banach’s fixed point theorem to establish the uniqueness of the solution and the Leray–Schauder alternative to establish an existence result. Furthermore, numerical examples have been illustrated to support the theoretical analysis.
In future studies, we plan to enrich the literature in this new subject by studying other types of sequential coupled systems of fractional differential equations combining Hilfer and Caputo fractional derivative operators and other types of non-zero boundary conditions.