Nonlinear Analysis, Theory.Methods& Applications.Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 83-91. PergamonPress, 1976.

Printedin Great Britain

STABILITY OF NONAUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS*

J. P. LASALLE
Lefschetz Center for Dynamical Systems, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912

(Received 8 March 1976)

Key words: Stability, instability, n o n a u t o n o m o u s (time-varying), ordinary differential equations, invariance

1. F O R E W O R D
ON at least three separate occasions, I have felt that the theory behind Liapunov's second or
direct method was virtually complete and that the remaining difficulties all lay with applications.
Each time I was wrong and now for the fourth time I believe that in so far as ordinary differential
equations are concerned the theory is virtually complete, and the final chapter can be written.
You may judge for yourself the value of that statement, and what I will do here is to show how
I would write the penultimate chapter.

2. I N T R O D U C T I O N
Recent results of Artstein [1-4] on the limiting equations of nonautonomous ordinary
differential equations, and the consequent invariance properties of the positive limit sets of
solutions of a broad class of nonautonomous systems, make possible a further extension of
Liapunov's direct method. For this a principal role is played by a theorem due originally to
Yoshizawa (see [20, 21]). An antecedent to Yoshizawa's result can be found in a theorem on
asymptotic stability given by Marachkov [17, 21] in 1940. Yoshizawa's theorem has been im-
proved by Burton [6], Rouche [7], Haddock [11] and others (a good account of this, with
references, can be found in [9]). They relax conditions on the vector field (the right-hand side)
of the differential equation but place stronger conditions on the Liapunov function. With our
main objective being to exploit the invariance properties of solutions and to relate Liapunov
functions to the location of the positive limit sets of solutions, the natural restriction is on the
vector field. In [4], Artstein pointed out that the author's modification of Yoshizawa's theorem
(see [13] or [15]) carries over immediately with his weaker assumption (Assumption A) on the
vector field. We want to go further and give the most general statement we can of this type of
result. We will explain at the end without going into details how these results are themselves
sharpened by a knowledge ofinvariance properties of the positive limit sets of solutions. Sufficient
conditions are also given for asymptotic and uniform asymptotic stability and for various types
of instability.

3. L I A P U N O V F U N C T I O N S A N D T H E L O C A T I O N OF POSITIVE L I M I T SETS
The basic differential equation is
= f ( t , x) (1)
~This research was supported in part by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Grant # A F - A F O S R 71-2078B
and the United States Army Grant #DA-ARO-D-31-124-73-G130.

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