Dynamical systems with several equilibria and natural Liapunov functions
Dynamical systems with several equilibria occur in various fields of science and engineering: electrical machines, chemical reactions, economics, biology, neural networks. As pointed out by many researchers, good results on qualitative behaviour of such systems may be obtained if a Liapunov function is available. Fortunately for almost all systems cited above the Liapunov function is associated in a natural way as an energy of a certain kind and it is at least nonincreasing along systems solutions....