Structured population models, conservation laws, and delay equations (Q1592719)

The authors provide a thorough study of general principles which allow the reduction of certain age- and/or size-structured population models to ODEs or delay equations. The coefficients of the model of the structured population may depend on functionals (e.g., the total population size). Emphasis is given on coefficients that are sums of step functions and delta peaks. The authors first describe the concept of dimensionality reduction and the chain trick, which is here used to reduce the model of age-structured population to a system of ODEs. They further derive the delay equations for a model of a single population whose birth and death rate have at most a single delta peak and a single step. Then they discuss the state space of appropriate initial data of the resulting delay equation, identify the parameters of the latter, discuss the positivity of solutions and the characteristic equation. Finally, they specifically discuss populations structured by size and the Gurtin-MacCamy system with step functions, and mention juvenile growth depending on adults and two-sex models.