Observation and inverse problems in coupled cell networks

Romain Joly

Published 2011-03-09Version 1

A coupled cell network is a model for many situations such as food webs in ecosystems, cellular metabolism, economical networks... It consists in a directed graph $G$, each node (or cell) representing an agent of the network and each directed arrow representing which agent acts on which one. It yields a system of differential equations $\dot x(t)=f(x(t))$, where the component $i$ of $f$ depends only on the cells $x_j(t)$ for which the arrow $j\rightarrow i$ exists in $G$. In this paper, we investigate the observation problems in coupled cell networks: can one deduce the behaviour of the whole network (oscillations, stabilisation etc.) by observing only one of the cells? We show that the natural observation properties holds for almost all the interactions $f$.