Composing and Factoring Generalized Green's Operators and Ordinary Boundary Problems

We consider solution operators of linear ordinary boundary problems with “too many” boundary conditions, which are not always solvable. These generalized Green’s operators are a certain kind of generalized inverses of differential operators. We answer the question when the product of two generalized Green’s operators is again a generalized Green’s operator for the product of the corresponding differential operators and which boundary problem it solves. Moreover, we show that— provided a factorization of the underlying differential operator—a generalized boundary problem can be factored into lower order problems corresponding to a factorization of the respective Green’s operators. We illustrate our results by examples using the Maple package IntDiffOp, where the presented algorithms are implemented.