Prolongation of quasi-principal frame bundles and geometry of flag structures on manifolds

Abstract: Motivated by the geometric theory of differential equations and the variational approach to the equivalence problem for geometric structures on manifolds, we consider the problem of equivalence for distributions with fixed submanifolds of flags on each fiber. We call them flag structures. The construction of the canonical frames for these structures can be given in the two prolongation steps: the first step, based on our previous works, gives the canonical bundle of moving frames for the fixed submanifolds of flags on each fiber and the second step consists of the prolongation of the bundle obtained in the first step. The bundle obtained in the first step is not as a rule a principal bundle so that the classical Tanaka prolongation procedure for filtered structures can not be applied to it. However, under natural assumptions on submanifolds of flags and on the ambient distribution, this bundle satisfies a nice weaker property. The main goal of the present paper is to formalize this property, introducing the so-called quasi-principle frame bundles, and to generalize the Tanaka prolongation procedure to these bundles. Applications to the equivalence problems for systems of differential equations of mixed order, bracket generating distributions, sub-Riemannian and more general structures on distributions are given.