Nonlocal Extensions of First Order Initial Value Problems

We study certain Volterra integral equations that extend and recover first order ordinary differential equations (ODEs). We formulate the former equations from the latter by replacing classical derivatives with nonlocal integral operators with anti-symmetric kernels. Replacements of spatial derivatives have seen success in fracture mechanics, diffusion, and image processing. In this paper, we consider nonlocal replacements of time derivatives which contain future data. To account for the nonlocal nature of the operators, we formulate initial “volume” problems (IVPs) for these integral equations; the initial data is prescribed on a time interval rather than at a single point. As a nonlocality parameter vanishes, we show that the solutions to these equations recover those of classical ODEs. We demonstrate this convergence with exact solutions of some simple IVPs. However, we find that the solutions of these nonlocal models exhibit several properties distinct from their classical counterparts. For example, the solutions exhibit discontinuities at periodic intervals. In addition, for some IVPs, a continuous initial profile develops a measure-valued singularity in finite time. At subsequent periodic intervals, these solutions develop increasingly higher order distributional singularities.