Aggregation and emergence in systems of ordinary differential equations

The aim of this article is to present aggregation methods for a system of ordinary differential equations (ODE's) involving two time scales. The system of ODE's is composed of the sum of fast parts and a perturbation. The fast dynamics are assumed to be conservative. The corresponding first integrals define a few global variables. Aggregation corresponds to the reduction of the dimension of the dynamical system which is replaced by an aggregated system governing the global variables at the slow time scale. The centre manifold theorem is used in order to get the slow reduced model as a Taylor expansion of a small parameter. We particularly look for the conditions necessary to get emerging properties in the aggregated model with respect to the nonaggregated one. We define two different types of emergences, functional and dynamical. Functional emergence corresponds to different functions for the two dynamics, aggregated and nonaggregated. Dynamical emergence means that both dynamics are qualitatively different. We also present averaging methods for aggregation when the fast system converges towards a stable limit cycle.