Volterra Sweeping Processes with Multivalued Perturbations under Compactness Conditions

Abstract: We study integro-differential sweeping processes of Volterra type in a separable Hilbert space, in which the velocity is governed by the normal cone to a prox-regular moving set and is driven by an outer set-valued perturbation together with a history-dependent integral term that endows the dynamics with memory. The perturbation is assumed measurable, with closed convex values, of linear growth, and upper semicontinuous from the strong to the weak topology. We study the existence of absolutely continuous solutions under either of two alternative compactness hypotheses: ball-compactness of the moving sets, or a measure-of-noncompactness condition on the perturbation. After a reduction of the constrained dynamics to an unconstrained differential inclusion and uniform a priori bounds on the state and its velocity, existence follows from a fixed-point theorem for set-valued maps with contractible values. The memory of the process makes this contractibility delicate, and we obtain it through a continuation argument that propagates the history of the dynamics. As applications, we solve a quasistatic frictionless viscoelastic contact problem with long memory and a spatially distributed bioeconomic fishery model with ecological memory, both featuring uncertain set-valued forcing and a moving constraint set that is not ball-compact.