A model for an age-structured population with two time scales

Abstract

In the modelisation of the dynamics of a sole population, an interesting issue is the influence of daily vertical migrations of the larvae on the whole dynamical process. As a first step towards getting some insight on that issue, we propose a model that describes the dynamics of an age-structured population living in an environment divided into N different spatial patches. We distinguish two time scales: at the fast time scale, we have migration dynamics and at the slow time scale, the demographic dynamics. The demographic process is described using the classical McKendrick model for each patch, and a simple matrix model including the transfer rates between patches depicts the migration process. Assuming that the migration process is conservative with respect to the total population and some additional technical assumptions, we proved in a previous work that the semigroup associated to our problem has the property of positive asynchronous exponential growth and that the characteristic elements of that asymptotic behaviour can be approximated by those of a scalar classical McKendrick model. In the present work, we develop the study of the nature of the convergence of the solutions of our problem to the solutions of the associated scalar one when the ratio between the time scales is ε (0 < ε ⪡ 1). The main result decomposes the action of the semigroup associated to our problem into three parts: 1. (1) the semigroup associated to a demographic scalar problem times the vector of the equilibrium distribution of the migration process; 2. (2) the semigroup associated to the transitory process which leads to the first part; and 3. (3) an operator, bounded in norm, of order ε.