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Coupling vs decoupling approaches for PDE/ODE systems modeling intercellular signaling

We consider PDE/ODE systems for the simulation of intercellular signaling in multicellular environments. The intracellular processes for each cell described here by ODEs determine the long-time dynamics, but the PDE part dominates the solving effort. Thus, it is not clear if commonly used decoupling methods can outperform a coupling approach. Based on a sensitivity analysis, we present a systematic comparison between coupling and decoupling approaches for this class of problems and show numerical results. For biologically relevant configurations of the model, our quantitative study shows that a coupling approach performs much better than a decoupling one.