Power-series solutions of fractional-order compartmental models

Abstract

Compartmental models based on coupled differential equations of fractional order have been widely employed in the literature for modeling. An abstraction of these models is given by a system with polynomial vector field. We investigate the use of power series for solving generic polynomial differential equations in any dimension, with Caputo fractional derivative. As is well known, power series convert a continuous formulation into a discrete system of difference equations, which are easily solved by recursion. The novelty of this paper is that we rigorously prove that the series converge on a neighborhood of the initial instant, which is an analogue of the Cauchy–Kovalevskaya theorem. Besides, these series are proved to be continuous with respect to the fractional index. For applications, a general-purpose symbolic implementation of truncated power series is developed, and its execution is illustrated for the fractional SIR epidemiological model.