The Knaster–Tarski theorem versus monotone nonexpansive mappings

Let $X$ be a partially ordered set with the property that each family of order intervals of the form $[a,b],[a,\rightarrow )$ with the finite intersection property has a nonempty intersection. We show that every directed subset of $X$ has a supremum. Then we apply the above result to prove that if $X$ is a topological space with a partial order $\preceq $ for which the order intervals are compact, $\mathcal {F}$ is a nonempty commutative family of monotone maps from $X$ into $X$ and there exists $c\in X$ such that $c\preceq Tc$ for every $T\in \mathcal {F}$, then the set of common fixed points of $\mathcal {F}$ is nonempty and has a maximal element. The result, specialized to the case of Banach spaces, gives a general fixed point theorem for monotone mappings that drops many assumptions from several recent results in this area. An application to the theory of integral equations of Urysohn’s type is also given.