1304 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 53, NO.

11, NOVEMBER 2006

Dynamics and Traveling Waves in

CNN Vector Disease Model
Angela Slavova

Abstract—In this brief, a cellular neural network (CNN) vector host is given by IV IV . We
disease model is investigated from the point of view of its dynamics. obtain the following equation:
Some vector-borne diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and ty-
phus, which arrive and spread in new areas, are one of the main
public health problems throughout the world. The investigations of IV (1)
the spatial spread of newly introduced diseases are interesting and
challenging for both theory and applications. Existence of traveling
waves for such CNN vector disease model is proved. Simulations where is the rate at which the density of infections van-
of the obtained CNN model are given, which confirm the obtained ishes, is a diffusion constant, and is the difference
theoretical results. of host densities of arriving and leaving infections per unit time.
Index Terms—Cellular neural network (CNN), harmonic bal- In (1), we can substitute IV by
ance method, traveling waves, vector disease model.

IV SV
I. INTRODUCTION

N HIS pioneering work, Britton [2] used a logistic-based re-

I action–diffusion model to investigate the spread of an ad-
vantageous gene in a spatially extended population. Kermack
and McKendrik [12] proposed a simple deterministic model for where SV since we assume that the vector
a directly transmitted viral or bacterial agent in a closed pop- population is large enough, i.e., the density of vectors that be-
ulation consisting of susceptibles, infectives, and recovereds. come exposed at time in is proportional to the den-
This model is described by a nonlinear integral equation and has sity of infectious hosts at time in , is a positive constant,
been studied extensively [6], [12]. Later, the Kermack–McK- is the proportion of vectors that arrive in at time
endrik model has been generalized to a space-dependent inte- starting from at time , and is the proportion of vec-
grodifferential equation [11]. Ruan and Xiao [15] studied the tors that are still infectious units of time after they became ex-
model in which the spatial spread in a region is modeled in par- posed. After substituting IV into (1), changing the limits,
tial integrodifferential equation by a diffusion term. They estab- and denoting and , we
lished the existence of traveling front waves in the vector disease obtain the following diffusive integrodifferential equation mod-
model when the kernel takes some specific forms. eling the vector disease:
We will consider a host population in a bounded region
, where a disease is carried by a vector. The host
population is divided into two classes (i.e., susceptible and in-
fectious), and the vector population is divided into three classes
(i.e., infectious, exposed, and susceptible). Let us denote the
normalized spatial density of infectious host at time in by
and the normalized spatial density of susceptible host at
(2)
time in by . Mention that normalization is done with
respect to the spatial density of the total population; therefore,
The initial and boundary conditions are
we have , , .
We define the normalized spatial density of infectious vector at
time in by IV and the normalized spatial density of
susceptible host at time in by SV . Let denote the (3)
host–vector constant rate; then, the density of new infections in

Manuscript received February 8, 2006; revised April 16, 2006. This work
where is a continuous function for ,
was supported in part by the North Atlantic Treat Organization (NATO) under and is the outward normal derivative on . The
Grant ICS.NR.CLG 981757. This paper was recommended by Associate Editor convolution kernel is a positive continuous
Z. Galias. function in its variables , , , and
The author is with the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian
Academy of Sciences, Sofia 1113, Bulgaria (e-mail: slavova@math.bas.bg). . We will suppose that the convo-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCSII.2006.882358 lution kernel has the form .
1057-7130/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE
SLAVOVA: DYNAMICS AND TRAVELING WAVES 1305

Therefore, we derive from (2) the following reaction–diffusion properties of (5) by using the describing function method [13].
model: Applying the double Fourier transform

(4)

We shall establish in this brief the existence of traveling front

to the CNN model (5), we obtain
waves in the vector disease model when the kernel takes the
form of a delta kernel, which leads to investigation of the re-
action–diffusion-type equation without delay. The cases with (6)
a local strong kernel leading to the integrodifferential equation
with a local delay have been studied in [15]. The case with a According to the describing function technique [13], the transfer
general nonlocal kernel deserves further investigations. function in this case is
In Section II, we shall introduce the appropriate cellular
neural network (CNN) representation of the vector disease
model (4). The dynamics of this model will be studied by using
the describing function technique. In Section III, the existence
We are looking for possible periodic solutions of our CNN
of traveling waves of our CNN vector disease model will be
model (5) of the following form:
proved.

(7)
II. CNN MODEL AND ITS DYNAMICS
If we take periodic boundary conditions [5], [16] for our CNN
It is known [5], [14] that some autonomous CNNs repre- model (5), we obtain the following values of the spatial fre-
sent an excellent approximation to nonlinear partial differen- quency:
tial equations (PDEs). In this section, we will present the model
(4) by a reaction–diffusion CNN. The intrinsic space distributed
(8)
topology makes the CNN able to produce real-time solutions
of nonlinear PDEs. Consider the following well-known PDE,
generally referred to us in the literature as a reaction–diffusion Remark 1: As is assumed to be periodic, with minimal
equation [2]: period , one has

for any . On the other hand, since we take periodic

where , , is a matrix with the diffusion boundary conditions of our CNN model [5], [16], i.e.,
coefficients, and is the Laplacian operator in . There are
several ways to approximate the Laplacian operator in discrete
space by a CNN synaptic law with an appropriate -template.
In our case, we will take the following one-dimensional (1-D)
discretized Laplacian template [5], [14]: making the array circular, therefore we impose that

Therefore, the CNN representation for our vector disease Combining the above equalities with , we get
model (4) will be the following:

(5) After substituting and in the transfer

function and deriving its real and imaginary parts, we obtain
The above equation is actually an ordinary differential equations together with (8) for the unknowns , , and .
equation that is identified as the state equation of an au- According to the describing function technique [13], the fol-
tonomous CNN made of cells. For the output of our lowing proposition then holds:
CNN model, we will take the standard sigmoid function Proposition 1: CNN model (5) for the vector disease model
( const. and [3], [4]). Let (4) with circular array of cells has periodic solution
us denote by the nonlinear part with a finite set of spatial frequencies ,
of this equation. We shall study the dynamics and the stability , and a period .
1306 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 53, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2006

To complete our stability analysis, we will define the equi- wave solutions of autonomous CNNs [10]. There are two possi-
librium points of the CNN model (5). Let us rewrite (5) in the bilities of the structure of traveling wave solutions: in 1-D case
following way: and in two-dimensional case, respectively, i.e.,

(9)

where is an -dimensional vector with elements , is a

or
1-D discretized Laplacian template , and is a convo-
lution operator. According to the theory of dynamical systems
[9], the equilibrium points of (9) are those satisfying
where is given, is a continuous func-
tion, and is an unknown real number. Denote
(or ). Then, and satisfy the equa-
There are two steady states, namely 1) and 2)
tion of the form
. The Jacobian matrix of the equilibrium points can be
computed by the following formula:

ps where , and are real numbers for to . If the

above equation depends on the past and future, i.e., if
Then, the following theorem holds for the stability of the steady
states.
Theorem 1: For our CNN model (5) with periodic boundary then it is called mixed type. If or , then it is
conditions called advance or delay type, respectively. The above equation is
1) if , then the steady state is asymptotically called bistable if it has spatially homogeneous solutions
stable, and is either stable or unstable for , , and satisfying and
;
2) if , then the steady state is either stable for all
or unstable, and is asymptotically stable in for all .
the interval .
Suppose that the equation is bistable. Recently, it was shown
Proof: The Jacobian matrix of the equilibrium points in
[10] that it has a unique monotone solution satisfying the fol-
our case is . Then, for the steady state
lowing boundary conditions:
, we have the following eigenvalues of :

trace
Our objective in this section is to study the structure of trav-
eling wave solutions of CNN biological model.
which is negative for and either negative or positive for Let us consider our CNN model (5). The traveling wave so-
. For the steady state , the eigenvalues of lutions will be presented in the following form:
the Jacobian are
(10)
trace
where , is a parameter. Note that is the
coordinate moving along the array with a velocity equal to
which will be either positive or negative for and negative . Substituting (10) in (5), we obtain
for . This proves the theorem.
Remark 2: Recall that represents the contact rate and rep-
resents the recovery rate. The above stability results indicate that
there is a threshold at . If , then the proportion of where the dot denotes differentiation with respect to . The two
infectious individuals tends to zero as becomes large and dis- difference terms can be
ease dies out. If , the proportion of infectious individuals replaced approximately by the first derivatives and ,
tends to an endemic level as becomes large. respectively. Hence, we obtain
There are periodic solutions in the region .
(11)

III. TRAVELING WAVES OF THE CNN MODEL

Clearly, and are solutions of the stationary
There have been many studies on traveling wave solutions of problem. Thus, there are two equilibria, namely and
spatially discrete or both spatially and time discrete systems. In . The following theorem for the traveling
our case, we shall study the existence and structure of traveling waves of vector disease CNN model (5) holds.
SLAVOVA: DYNAMICS AND TRAVELING WAVES 1307

The case when the convolution kernel is taken in the form of

is not considered in the litera-
ture. For the obtained reaction–diffusion without delay (4), we
first construct the corresponding CNN model. Then, we study
the dynamics of this model by applying the describing function
technique and prove the existence of periodic solutions.
Traveling waves are constructed, and their existence is proved
both theoretically and numerically through the CNN model sim-
ulation.

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