Section: Overall Objectives

Context and overall objectives of the project-team

The MAMBA (Modelling and Analysis in Medical and Biological Applications) team is the continuation of the BANG (Biophysics, Numerical Analysis and Geophysics) team, which itself was a continuation of the former project-team M3N. Historically, the BANG team, headed by Benoît Perthame during 11 years (2003-2013), has developed models, simulations and numerical algorithms for two kinds of problems involving dynamics of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs).

The dynamics of complex physical or biophysical phenomena involves many agents, e.g. proteins or cells - which can be seen as active agents. Mathematically, they can be represented either explicitly as individuals with their dynamics modelled e.g. through branching trees and piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMP), or stochastic differential equations, or under certain conditions be grouped or locally averaged, in which case their dynamics is mimicked by Ordinary or Partial Differential Equations (ODEs/PDEs).

Biology and medicine presently face the difficulty to make sense of the data newly available by means of recent signal acquisition methods. Modelling through agent-based or continuous models is a unique way to explain (model) the observations and then compute, control and predict the consequences of the mechanisms under study. These are the overall goals of Mamba.