Quasi-steady state reduction for compartmental systems

We present a method to determine an asymptotic reduction (in the sense of Tikhonov and Fenichel) for singularly perturbed compartmental systems in the presence of slow transport. It turns out that the reduction can be derived from the individual interaction terms alone. We apply the result to spatially discretized reaction–diffusion systems and obtain (based on the reduced discretized systems) a heuristic to reduce reaction–diffusion systems in presence of slow diffusion.