Alternating direction finite element (ADFE) scheme for d-dimensional nonlin-ear system of parabolic integro-differential equations is studied. By using a local approxi-mation based on patches of finite elements to treat the capacity term qi(u), decomposition of the coefficient matrix is realized; by using alternating direction, the multi-dimensional problem is reduced to a family of single space variable problems, calculation work is sim-
plified; by using finite element method, high accuracy for space variant is kept; by using inductive hypothesis reasoning, the difficulty coming from the nonlinearity of the coeffi-cients and boundary conditions is treated; by introducing Ritz-Volterra projection, the difficulty coming from the memory term is solved. Finally, by using various techniques for priori estimate for differential equations, the unique resolvability and convergence proper-
ties for both FE and ADFE schemes are rigorously demonstrated, and optimal H1 and L2 norm space estimates and O((t)2) estimate for time variant are obtained.
