A Generalization of Smillie's Theorem on Strongly Cooperative Tridiagonal Systems
Provides a theoretical generalization for stability analysis in cooperative tridiagonal systems, relevant to biological and ecological models.
The authors generalize Smillie's theorem on the stability of strongly cooperative tridiagonal systems to cooperative systems with an observability condition, extending prior results by Smillie and Smith.
Smillie (1984) proved an interesting result on the stability of nonlinear, time-invariant, strongly cooperative, and tridiagonal dynamical systems. This result has found many applications in models from various fields including biology, ecology, and chemistry. Smith (1991) has extended Smillie's result and proved entrainment in the case where the vector field is time-varying and periodic. We use the theory of linear totally nonnegative differential systems developed by Schwarz (1970) to give a generalization of these two results. This is based on weakening the requirement for strong cooperativity to cooperativity, and adding an additional observability-type condition.