Model reduction for networks of coupled oscillators

We present a collective coordinate approach to describe coupled phase oscillators. We apply the method to study synchronisation in a Kuramoto model. In our approach, an N-dimensional Kuramoto model is reduced to an n-dimensional ordinary differential equation with n << N, constituting an immense reduction in complexity. The onset of both local and global synchronisation is reproduced to good numerical accuracy, and we are able to describe both soft and hard transitions. By introducing two collective coordinates, the approach is able to describe the interaction of two partially synchronised clusters in the case of bimodally distributed native frequencies. Furthermore, our approach allows us to accurately describe finite size scalings of the critical coupling strength. We corroborate our analytical results by comparing with numerical simulations of the Kuramoto model with all-to-all coupling networks for several distributions of the native frequencies. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.