Coupling vs decoupling approaches for PDE/ODE systems modeling intercellular signaling
This work provides guidance for computational biologists and numerical analysts on efficient simulation of multicellular signaling systems.
The paper compares coupling and decoupling methods for PDE/ODE systems modeling intercellular signaling, finding that coupling outperforms decoupling in biologically relevant configurations.
We consider PDE/ODE systems for the simulation of intercellular signaling in multicellular environments. The intracellular processes for each cell described here by ODEs determine the long-time dynamics, but the PDE part dominates the solving effort. Thus, it is not clear if commonly used decoupling methods can outperform a coupling approach. Based on a sensitivity analysis, we present a systematic comparison between coupling and decoupling approaches for this class of problems and show numerical results. For biologically relevant configurations of the model, our quantitative study shows that a coupling approach performs much better than a decoupling one.