On the Stability of Critical Point for Positive Systems and Its Applications to Biological Systems

초록

The coexistence and extinction of species are important concepts for biological systems and can be distinguished by an investigation of stability. When determining local stability of nonlinear systems, Lyapunov indirect method based on the Jacobian linearization has been widely employed due to its simplicity. Despite such popularity, it is not applicable to singular systems whose Jacobian has at least one eigenvalue that is equal to zero. In such singular cases, an appropriate Lyapunov function should be sought to determine the stability of systems, which is rather difficult and quite involved. In this paper, we seek for a simple criterion to determine stability of the equilibrium that is located at the boundary of the positive orthant, when one of eigenvalues of the Jacobian is zero. The goal of the paper is to present a generalized condition for the equilibrium to attract all trajectories that starting from initial condition in the positive orthant and near the equilibrium. Unlike the Lyapunov direct method, the proposed method requires just a simple algebraic computation for checking the stability of the critical point. Our approach is applied to various biological systems to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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