Time triggered stochastic hybrid systems (TTSHS) constitute a class of piecewise-deterministic Markov processes (PDMP), where continuous-time evolution of the state space is interspersed with discrete stochastic events. Whenever a stochastic event occurs, the state space is reset based on a random map. Prior work on this topic has focused on the continuous-time evolution being modeled as a linear time- invariant system, and in this contribution, we generalize these results to consider nonlinear continuous dynamics. Our approach relies on approximating the nonlinear dynamics between two successive events as a linear time-varying system and using this approximation to derive analytical solutions for the state space’s statistical moments. The TTSHS framework is used to model continuous growth in an individual cell’s size and its subsequent division into daughters. It is well known that exponential growth in cell size, together with a size- independent division rate, leads to an unbounded variance in cell size. Motivated by recent experimental findings, we consider nonlinear growth in cell size based on a Michaelis- Menten function and show that this leads to size homeostasis in the sense that the variance in cell size remains bounded. Moreover, we provide a closed-form expression for the variance in cell size as a function of model parameters and validate it by performing exact Monte Carlo simulations. In summary, our work provides an analytical approach for characterizing moments of a nonlinear stochastic dynamical system that can have broad applicability in studying random phenomena in both engineering and biology.
Numerical Solutions of the Hattendorff Differential Equation for Multi-state Markov Insurance Models
