Copyright © 2010 Alexander Domoshnitsky. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The method to compare only one component of the solution vector of linear functional differential systems, which does not require heavy sign restrictions on their coefficients, is proposed in this paper. Necessary and sufficient conditions of the positivity of elements in a corresponding row of Green's matrix are obtained in the form of theorems about differential inequalities. The main idea of our approach is to construct a first order functional differential equation for the nth component of the solution vector and then to use assertions about positivity of its Green's functions. This demonstrates the importance to study scalar equations written in a general operator form, where only properties of the operators and not their forms are assumed. It should be also noted that the sufficient conditions, obtained in this paper, cannot be improved in a corresponding sense and does not require any smallness of the interval [0,ω], where the system is considered.