Abstract

The purpose of this work is reviewing some reduction results to deal with systems of nonautonomous ordinary differential equations with two time scales. They could be included among the so-called approximate aggregation methods. The existence of different time scales in a system, together with some long-term features, are used to build up a simpler system governed by a lesser number of state variables. The asymptotic behavior of the latter system is then used to describe the asymptotic behaviour of the former one. The reduction results are stated in two particular but important cases: periodic systems and asymptotically autonomous systems. The reduction results are illustrated with the help of simple spatial SIS epidemic models including either periodic or asymptotically autonomous terms.