Stochastic morphological evolution equations

The inadequacy of locally defined set-valued differential equations to describe the evolution of shapes and morphological forms in biology, which are usually neither convex or nondecreasing, was recognised by J.-P. Aubin, who introduced morphological evolution equations, which are essentially nonlocally defined set-valued differential equations with the inclusion vector field also depending on the entire reachable set. This concept is extended here to the stochastic setting of set-valued Itô evolution equations in Hilbert spaces. Due to the nonanticipative nature of Itô calculus, the evolving reachable sets are nonanticipative nonempty closed random sets. The existence of solutions and their dependence on initial data are established. The latter requires the introduction of a time-oriented semi-metric in time-space variables. As a consequence the stochastic morphological evolution equations generate a deterministic nonautonomous dynamical system formulated as a two-parameter semigroup with the complication that the random subsets take values in different spaces at different time instances due to the nonanticipativity requirement. It is also shown how nucleation processes can be handled in this conceptual framework.