Approximating the Stability Region for a Differential Equation with a Distributed Delay

Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, N2L 3G1, Canada

Corresponding author: sacampbell@uwaterloo.ca

Abstract

We discuss how distributed delays arise in biological models and review the literature on such models. We indicate why it is important to keep the distributions in a model as general as possible. We then demonstrate, through the analysis of a particular example, what kind of information can be gained with only minimal information about the exact distribution of delays. In particular we show that a distribution independent stability region may be obtained in a similar way that delay independent results are obtained for systems with discrete delays. Further, we show how approximations to the boundary of the stability region of an equilibrium point may be obtained with knowledge of one, two or three moments of the distribution. We compare the approximations with the true boundary for the case of uniform and gamma distributions and show that the approximations improve as more moments are used.