F. Cordero, A. Horváth, D. Manini, L. Napione, M. De Pierro, S. Pavan, A. Picco, A. Veglio, M. Sereno, F. Bussolino, G. Balbo
The simplification process must take into account both the structural aspects and the quantitative behavior of the original model. To control the simplification from a structural point of view, we propose a set of reduction steps that maintain the invariants of the original model. To ensure the correspondence between the simplified and the original models from a quantitative point of view we use the flow equivalent method that provides a way of obtaining the parameters of the simplified model on the basis of those of the original one.
To support the proposed methodology we show that a good agreement exists among the temporal evolutions of the relevant biological products in the simplified and detailed model evaluated with a large set of input parameters.