Dynamics of two-cell systems with discrete delays

Abstract

We consider the system of delay differential equations (DDE) representing the models containing two cells with time-delayed connections. We investigate global, local stability and the bifurcations of the trivial solution under some generic conditions on the Taylor coefficients of the DDE. Regarding eigenvalues of the connection matrix as bifurcation parameters, we obtain codimension one bifurcations (including pitchfork, transcritical and Hopf bifurcation) and Takens-Bogdanov bifurcation as a codimension two bifurcation. For application purposes, this is important since one can now identify the possible asymptotic dynamics of the DDE near the bifurcation points by computing quantities which depend explicitly on the Taylor coefficients of the original DDE. Finally, we show that the analytical results agree with numerical simulations.