Recently R. Pandharipande, J. Solomon and R. Tessler initiated a study of the intersection theory on the moduli space of Riemann surfaces with boundary. They conjectured that the generating series of the intersection numbers is a specific solution of
a system of PDEs, that they called the open KdV equations. In this paper we show that the open KdV equations are closely related to the equations for the wave function of the KdV hierarchy. This allows us to give an explicit formula for the specific solution in terms of Wittens generating series of the intersection numbers on the moduli space of stable curves.
In this paper we prove that the generating series of the Hodge integrals over the moduli space of stable curves is a solution of a certain deformation of the KdV hierarchy. This hierarchy is constructed in the framework of the Dubrovin-Zhang theory o
f the hierarchies of the topological type. It occurs that our deformation of the KdV hierarchy is closely related to the hierarchy of the Intermediate Long Wave equation.
