Abstract functional differential equations and reaction-diffusion systems

Several fundamental results on the existence and behavior of solutions to semilinear functional differential equations are developed in a Banach space setting. The ideas are applied to reaction-diffusion systems that have time delays in the nonlinear reaction terms. The techniques presented here include differential inequalities, invariant sets, and Lyapunov functions, and therefore they provide for a wide range of applicability. The results on inequalities and especially strict inequalities are new even in the context of semi linear equations whose nonlinear terms do not contain delays.