Maximum principle and its application for the time-fractional diffusion equations

Abstract

Abstract In the paper, maximum principle for the generalized time-fractional diffusion equations including the multi-term diffusion equation and the diffusion equation of distributed order is formulated and discussed. In these equations, the time-fractional derivative is defined in the Caputo sense. In contrast to the Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative, the Caputo fractional derivative is shown to possess a suitable generalization of the extremum principle well-known for ordinary derivative. As an application, the maximum principle is used to get some a priori estimates for solutions of initial-boundary-value problems for the generalized time-fractional diffusion equations and then to prove uniqueness of their solutions.