Orateur
Summary
Agent-based paradigm for the simulation of complex systems is based on the modeling of the individual entities of the system. Given a chosen level of description, this implies modeling each and every entity of the system. When modeling biological systems at the cellular and/or molecular level, this results in the simulation of multitudes of agents, which raises performance issues. However, this is generally not necessary to have the same level of detail on every part of the system. In this paper, we propose to introduce dynamically an aggregated level in the simulation of avascular tumor growth. This model handles cells and PAI-1 molecules that are believed to play a key role in the amoeboid migration of cancerous cells. However, migratory events can only be triggered on the periphery of the tumor. The interior can therefore be modeled in an aggregated way, by replacing the individual cells and molecules by a global agent. We show that this can be done without changing the global dynamics of the system, and gaining a linear increase of computing time, while the number of cells and molecules increases exponentially.