Periodic orbits in general Glass networks

Abstract: Glass networks are piecewise linear ODE systems that models an interactive system where there are 'switching points': the underlying dynamic changes qualitatively when a certain variable pass over a threshold. One of the most well-studied class of models of the original Glass network are the cyclic attractor in the orthants (a sequence of orthants where the flow from one orthant to another is unanimous), which was first defined and analysed by Glass and Pasternack in 1978. In that paper, the authors gave a complete classification of the topological features of the flow in a full-rank cyclic attractor, which is a cyclic attractor that cannot be contained in any sub-cube in the graph of orthants. In this paper, we will extend the definition of cyclic attractor to one generalisation of the Glass network, one that allows for multiple switching points in each variables, and give a complete classification of the topological features of the flow for any cyclic attractor, both in the extended network and the original network, including non full-rank ones. We will show that in any cyclic attractor, there is either a unique and asymptotically stable periodic orbit, or that all periodic orbits are degenerated.