A general vectorial Ekeland’s variational principle with a P-distance

Abstract

In this paper, by using p-distances on uniform spaces, we establish a general vectorial Ekeland variational principle (in short EVP), where the objective function is defined on a uniform space and taking values in a pre-ordered real linear space and the perturbation involves a p-distance and a monotone function of the objective function. Since p-distances are very extensive, such a form of the perturbation in deed contains many different forms of perturbations appeared in the previous versions of EVP. Besides, we only require the objective function has a very weak property, as a substitute for lower semi-continuity, and only require the domain space (which is a uniform space) has a very weak type of completeness, i.e., completeness with respect to a certain p-distance. Such very weak type of completeness even includes local completeness when the uniform space is a locally convex topological vector space. From the general vectorial EVP, we deduce a general vectorial Caristi’s fixed point theorem and a general vectorial Takahashi’s nonconvex minimization theorem. Moreover, we show that the above three theorems are equivalent to each other. We see that the above general vectorial EVP includes many particular versions of EVP, which extend and complement the related known results.