The Weierstrass necessary condition for fractional calculus of variations

TL;DR

This paper extends classical calculus of variations to fractional derivatives and integrals, establishing necessary optimality conditions including Euler-Lagrange, Weierstrass, and Legendre conditions for fractional variational problems.

Contribution

It introduces a fractional analogue of the Du Bois-Reymond lemma and proves classical optimality conditions using standard methods in the fractional calculus context.

Findings

Established fractional Euler-Lagrange equations for Caputo derivatives.

Proved the fractional Weierstrass and Legendre conditions.

Provided examples illustrating the application of the main results.

Abstract

In this paper, we study problems of minimization of a functional depending on the fractional Caputo derivative of order $0<\alpha \leq 1$ and the fractional Riemann- Liouville integral of order $\beta > 0$ at fixed endpoints. A fractional analogue of the Du Bois-Reymond lemma is proved, and the Euler-Lagrange conditions are proved for the simplest problem of fractional variational calculus with fixed ends and for the fractional isoperimetric problem. An approach is proposed to obtain the necessary first-order conditions for the strong and weak extrema, and the necessary optimality conditions are obtained. From these necessary conditions, as a consequence, we obtain the Weierstrass condition and its local modification. It should be noted that some papers in the literature claim that the standard proof of the Legendre condition in the classical case $\alpha=1$ cannot be adapted to the fractional case $0< \alpha <1$ with final constraints. Despite this, we prove the Legendre conditions by the standard classical method via the Weierstrass condition. In addition, the necessary Weierstrass-Erdmann conditions at the corner points are obtained. Examples are provided to illustrate the significance of the main results obtained.