Section: Research Program

Mathematical and computational methods

BIOCORE's action is centered on the mathematical modeling of biological systems, more particularly of artificial ecosystems, that have been built or strongly shaped by human. Indeed, the complexity of such systems where life plays a central role often makes them impossible to understand, control, or optimize without such a formalization. Our theoretical framework of choice for that purpose is Control Theory, whose central concept is “the system”, described by state variables, with inputs (action on the system), and outputs (the available measurements on the system). In modeling the ecosystems that we consider, mainly through ordinary differential equations, the state variables are often population, substrate and/or food densities, whose evolution is influenced by the voluntary or involuntary actions of man (inputs and disturbances). The outputs will be some product that one can collect from this ecosystem (harvest, capture, production of a biochemical product, etc), or some measurements (number of individuals, concentrations, etc). Developing a model in biology is however not straightforward: the absence of rigorous laws as in physics, the presence of numerous populations and inputs in the ecosystems, most of them being irrelevant to the problem at hand, the uncertainties and noise in experiments or even in the biological interactions require the development of dedicated techniques to identify and validate the structure of models from data obtained by or with experimentalists.

Building a model is rarely an objective in itself. Once we have checked that it satisfies some biological constraints (eg. densities stay positive) and fitted its parameters to data (requiring tailor-made methods), we perform a mathematical analysis to check that its behavior is consistent with observations. Again, specific methods for this analysis need to be developed that take advantage of the structure of the model (eg. the interactions are monotone) and that take into account the strong uncertainty that is linked to life, so that qualitative, rather than quantitative, analysis is often the way to go.

In order to act on the system, which often is the purpose of our modeling approach, we then make use of two strong points of Control Theory: 1) the development of observers, that estimate the full internal state of the system from the measurements that we have, and 2) the design of a control law, that imposes to the system the behavior that we want to achieve, such as the regulation at a set point or optimization of its functioning. However, due to the peculiar structure and large uncertainties of our models, we need to develop specific methods. Since actual sensors can be quite costly or simply do not exist, a large part of the internal state often needs to be re-constructed from the measurements and one of the methods we developed consists in integrating the large uncertainties by assuming that some parameters or inputs belong to given intervals. We then developed robust observers that asymptotically estimate intervals for the state variables [81]. Using the directly measured variables and those that have been obtained through such, or other, observers, we then develop control methods that take advantage of the system structure (linked to competition or predation relationships between species in bioreactors or in the trophic networks created or modified by biological control).