Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

This team is dedicated to modeling and controlling the spatio-temporal evolution of biological populations.

As we face the great problems arising in the field of population dynamics (for instance : new epidemics, optimization of the treatment of leukemia, understanding the mechanisms of interaction between neuron populations, etc.) there is a great need to develop more realistic models and mathematical tools to analyse them. Up to now most models used in population dynamics are mainly qualitative : they try to reproduce qualitative behaviours such as extinction of species, propagation of epidemics, synchronization of neurons, ... to validate underlying assumptions. There is still a great need of such qualitative studies to analyze the mechanisms of interaction. New models using integro-differential or other non local operators instead of parabolic equations for spatial interactions should be investigated. But there is also a need for more quantitative simulations of biological phenomena. In particular one may wish not only to simulate the phenomenon but to act on it: stop the propagation of an epidemic, improve the protocol of brain stimulation in Parkinson's disease treatment or of drug administration in leukemia, fight against pests of vineyard, ... Tools from automatic control theory have already been used in this field as optimal control ( [21] ), parameter identification or feedback design, but there still remain many open questions we intend to investigate. For instance optimal control is useful not only to describe an external action on the population but also internal interactions that can be seen as optimizing certain criteria.

A long term goal would be to forecast by simulation the evolution of a population in for instance epidemiology. Although in many cases models are not sufficiently reliable at present, we think we can begin to investigate the question of estimating the initial data for the simulation: this is the well known problem of data assimilation which is intensively studied in geophysics, oceanology and meteorology. Based on Kalman filtering, new techniques have been developed in these fields as the ensemble Kalman filtering. To our knowledge no similar research is done in population dynamics. One of our goals is to transfer, adapt and develop techniques of data assimilation to population dynamics.

These studies make it possible to develop specific softwares that are intended to be useful to our biologist partners. Developing these softwares and experimenting with the results of the numerical simulations are an important part of our workload. Till now those developments have been specific to each problem, but our team is thinking about common elements of our studies with a view to defining common software tools.