1. Introduction
In ancient times, fractional calculus was used by mathematicians due to its several applications in applied mathematics as well as mathematical physics. Recently, fractional differential equations have been used to model many real-world problems in circuit theory, fluid dynamics, physics, mathematical biology, quantum mechanics, electrochemistry, etc. Also, it is well known that non-integer-order derivatives control the models efficiently. Talebi et al. [
1] explored the application of fractional calculus to filtering structures for
-stable systems, where
-stable distributions are a class of probability distributions that generalize the Gaussian distribution and can describe asymmetric and heavy-tailed behavior. These distributions are encountered in real-world scenarios, including financial time series and communication channels. Fractional-order filters and processing methods might provide better tools for dealing with such systems. Therefore, studying these equations and finding their solutions is necessary. The general form of the Lienard equation [
2] is given by
Various types of selection of the functions
f,
g, and
h give distinct models. For example, if
is the damping force,
is the restoring force, and
is the external force, then it forms the damped pendulum equation. Moreover, if we have
,
and
, then Equation (
1) is transferred to the Van der Pol equation [
3], representing a nonlinear electronic oscillation model. However, it is well known that the exact solution of Equation (
1) is a complex problem.
Kong [
4] and Feng [
5] investigated the exact solution of the Lienard equation in the form
where,
, and
N are constant coefficients.
where,
, and
P are constant coefficients.
Some recent works in the literature, such as [
6,
7,
8,
9], focused on generalized forms of the Lienard and Duffing equations using fractional calculus. Fractional-order derivatives can explore various physical methods that vary with time and space [
10,
11]. Also, using fractional calculus principles is well established in several scientific fields. Bohner and Tunç [
12] conducted a qualitative analysis of Caputo fractional integro-differential equations with constant delays. This work delves into the dynamics of such equations, shedding light on their behavior and properties and contributing to the advancement of their understanding in this specialized area of mathematics. In [
13], the authors dived into fractional calculus and delay integro-differential equations. Their work, which focuses on Caputo proportional fractional derivatives, presents novel solution estimation techniques. By addressing these intricate equations, the authors contributed to advancing analytical methods in the context of fractional calculus and its applications. Many real-life phenomena are represented by the fractional Lienard equation and Duffing equation, such as oscillating circuit theory [
14,
15], the mass damping effect [
16], and pipelines and fluid dynamics [
17].
The general form of the fractional order Lienard equation is given as follows:
with respect to
Also, the fractional Duffing equation with the damping effect is given as follows:
subject to
In the literature, many analytical and numerical approaches exist for solving Equations (
4) and (
6). In 2004, Feng [
18] explicitly presented the exact solution of the Lienard equation and provided some applications. In 2008, Matinfar et al. [
19] used the variation iteration technique to solve the Lienard equation and compared the numerical solutions obtained with the analytic solution. Furthermore, Xu [
20] acquired the eight types of explicit analytical solutions of the Lienard equation, which included periodic wave solutions and solitary wave solutions in terms of elliptic Jacobian and trigonometric functions. Janiczek [
21] demonstrated the modulating functions method for all models described by fractional differential equations. Modulating functions are used to reduce the order of derivatives in an equation, generate equations without derivatives of output signals, and eliminate the need to solve differential equations. Chebyshev’s operational matrix method for solving the multi-term fractional-order ordinary differential equation was proposed by Atabakzadeh et al. [
22]. To apply this approach, they first converted the given problem into a system of fractional ODEs and then used the Chebyshev operational matrix method. Again, Kazem [
23] analyzed fractional ODEs via an integral operational matrix approach based on Jacobi polynomials. Nourazar and Mirzabeigy [
16] proposed a modified differential transform technique to deal with the fractional Duffing equation with a damping effect. In 2016, Ezz-Eldien [
24] discovered a new numerical approach to solving fractional variational problems. Furthermore, Gómez-Aguilar et al. [
17] used the Laplace homotopy analysis technique with a new fractional derivative without a singular kernel to solve the fractional Lienard equation that describes the fluid dynamics of the pipeline. The homotopy analysis method was implemented in [
25,
26] to solve the Duffing oscillator and the Lienard problem with a fractional derivative. Recently, Singh et al. [
14,
15,
27,
28] also made several effective attempts to find the solutions to Equations (
4) and (
6) by using a variety of techniques. Also, Kumar et al. [
29] used the Rabotnov fractional exponential kernel to solve the nonlinear Lienard equation numerically. More recently, Adel [
30] demonstrated an approach based on Bernoulli collocation and shifted Chebyshev collocation points to solve Equations (
4) and (
6).
In recent years, neural architecture-based approximation schemes have been used to solve FDEs, ODEs, PDEs, and delay differential equations (DDEs) [
31,
32,
33,
34,
35,
36,
37,
38]. In 2013, Lefik [
39] illustrated that an ANN performs the numerical representation of the inverse relation. It can be used as many times as needed in the same application, replacing traditional “ad hoc” back computation for any new piece of experimental data. Malik et al. [
40] proposed a hybrid heuristic approach to solve the Lienard equation based on genetic algorithms, such as memetic computation, combining genetic algorithms, the interior-point algorithm, and the active set algorithm. Furthermore, Mall and Chakraverty [
33,
36] used the multilayer perceptron and functional connection neural network with regression-based parameters to solve ODEs. In [
34,
38], the authors also used the multilayer perceptron technique with quasi-Newton and Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno (BFGS) algorithms to solve the singular initial and boundary value problems. Kumar et al. [
41] presented a comparative analysis of two distinct neural modeling approaches to approximate the multidimensional poverty levels within an Indian state. This study sought to provide useful information for choosing the best modeling approaches to determine poverty levels in the Indian setting by examining their performance and precision. Sahoo and Chakraverty [
42] proposed a symplectic artificial neural network to handle nonlinear systems arising in dusty plasma models. They presented the dynamics of Van der Pol–Mathieu–Duffing oscillator problems for different excitation functions using the proposed method, and numerical simulations and graphical representations were carried out to establish the accuracy of the presented algorithm.
Motivated by the above, in this manuscript, we discuss the functional link neural network architecture, which is a single-layer neural network. This article aims to find the solutions to fractional Lienard and Duffing equations using functional link neural networks. This technique offers us the following attractive features:
The proposed technique gives us the solution in a closed analytic form.
The functional link neural network consists of a single layer, and thus the number of network parameters is less than the traditional multilayer ANN and works with low computational complexity.
It is capable of fast learning and is computationally efficient.
This process does not need linearization to solve a nonlinear problem.
We have organized the present article as follows.
Section 2 includes some important preliminaries and discusses the structure of the Chebyshev and Legendre neural networks.
Section 3 discusses the methodology, including a well-explained algorithm and the implication protocol, while
Section 4 discusses the numerical experiments and their results.
Section 5 deals with the error analysis of the technique, while
Section 6 concludes the work.
4. Numerical Implementation
In this section, two fractional-order problems are solved using the ChNN and LeNN architectures. The numerical results show that the proposed technique is highly efficient and robust. All the computations were performed on a computer with an Intel Core i3 processor (Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA) with 8 gigabytes of RAM, and the simulation was conducted with Mathematica 11.1.0 for each problem.
Problem 1. Consider the particular choice of the parameters and in Equation (4). The fractional Lienard problem is given as follows [14,15,28]:where For
, the exact solution is already known with the given conditions
Equation (
22) presents the values of
and
.
As we discussed in
Section 4, we constructed the trial solution as
The given Lienard problem was solved by ChNN and LeNN techniques for the various values of
and employed by dividing the domain into 10 equidistant training points with 6 NACs. The acquired appropriate MSEs were
and
, respectively. The computational time for Problem 1 was 0.05 s and 0.09 s, respectively.
Table 1 shows the accurate values of the NACs after training by the SA algorithm. In
Table 2, we have listed the approximated solution by our methods (ChNN and LeNN), the methods of Singh [
14,
15,
28], and the exact solution.
Table 2 shows the good agreement with these methods.
In
Figure 4, we have compared the approximate solutions by the LeNN and ChNN methods with the solutions obtained by the methods given in [
14,
15,
28].
Figure 5 and
Figure 6 show the approximate solutions for the various values of
.
From
Figure 5 and
Figure 6, we observed that the solution varied continuously from the fractional-order solution to the integer order. Therefore, we can say that the behaviors of approximate solutions for different fractional orders converge to integer-order solutions.
Problem 2. Consider the particular choice of the parameters and in Equation (6). The fractional duffing equation is given as follows [14,15,28]: The exact solution of Problem 2 at
when using the differential transform method [
16] is given as follows:
The trial solution can be written as
The Duffing equation was solved with the ChNN and LeNN techniques for the various values of
. We trained the network using 10 equidistant points in the domain
with 6 NACs. The obtained MSEs were
and
, respectively. The appropriate values of the NACs using the SA algorithm are given in
Table 3. The computational time for Problem 2 was 0.05 s and 0.03 s, respectively. In
Table 4, we have listed the obtained solutions by the proposed methods (ChNN and LeNN) and the existing method’s solutions from [
15,
16,
28].
Table 4 shows the good accuracy for the acquired results and the results given in [
16].
In
Figure 7, we have compared the approximate solutions with the proposed method and the solutions given in [
15,
16,
28].
Figure 8 and
Figure 9 show the solutions for the different values of
.
From
Figure 8 and
Figure 9, we observed that the solutions varied continuously from fractional-order solutions to integer-order solutions. Therefore, we can say that the behaviors of the approximate solutions for different fractional orders converged to an integer-order solution, and the periodic behavior of the solution can be seen.
Problem 3. Consider the particular choice of the parameters 1, and 3 in Equation (4). The fractional duffing equation is given as follows [14,44]: The exact solution for the considered problem (Problem 3) for
is given as follows:
The trial solution can be written as
The given Duffing equation was solved with the ChNN and LeNN techniques for the various values of
. We trained the network by taking 10 equidistant points in the domain
with 6 NACs. The obtained MSEs were
and
, respectively. The computational time for the problem was 0.08 s and 0.09 s, respectively. The appropriate values for the NACs using the SA algorithm are given in
Table 5. In
Table 6, we listed the outcomes by the proposed method, analytic method and the solutions obtained by other existing numerical methods [
15,
44]. In
Table 7, we have shown the absolute error between the exact solution and solution obtained by the proposed technique and other existing techniques.
In
Figure 10, we have compared the approximate solutions with the proposed methods with the exact solution and the solutions given in [
15]. In
Figure 11 and
Figure 12, we have presented the solutions to Problem 3 for the various values of
.
In
Figure 11 and
Figure 12, we can see that the solution varied continuously from fractional order to integer order.
5. Error Analysis
For the above problems, we have presented the error analysis of the numerical solutions of the ChNN and LeNN techniques. Initially, we trained the neural network using the SA algorithm and collected the appropriate values of the network parameters. After that, we substituted the NAC values into the trial solution and obtained the results for the ChNN or LeNN techniques (according to the polynomial). To analyze the precision of the method within the domain [0,1], we also substituted it into Equation (
31):
where we found the
approximated continuous results through the ChNN and LeNN techniques.
approached 0 as the value of the MSE acquired with the ChNN and LeNN with the SA algorithm changed. The solution’s convergence depends upon the optimization algorithm, the number of network adaptive coefficients, and the neural network’s architecture, which we used.
For Problem 1, the mean square errors for the ChNN and LeNN techniques at
were
and
, respectively, which showed that the minimum error for the ChNN and LeNN was
. This presents that both the strategies’ precisions were inversely proportional to the mean square error value. When we exchanged the polynomials and used the SA algorithm for the network training, we observed that both techniques were strongly affected, as can be seen in
Table 1.
Problem 2 is known as the fractional-order Duffing equation. For
, the values of the MSE with 6 NACs by using ChNN and LeNN methods are
and
respectively. For the fractional value of
, the LeNN shows better results with minimum value for the MSE, however for
and
both techniques yielded a similar MSE. Problem 3 is also a fractional Lienard equation. We solved it approximately for the various values of
and obtained better results with less computational time than other existing numerical techniques [
15,
44].