We concentrate on the effects of heteroclinic cycles and the interplay of heteroclinic attractors or repellers on the boundary of the carrying simplices for low-dimensional discrete-time competitive systems. Based on the existence of the carrying simplex for the competitive mapping, we provide the criteria on stability of the heteroclinic cycle. This result can be seen as a discrete counterpart of that for the continuous-time systems. Several concrete discrete-time competition models are further analyzed, which do admit heteroclinic cycles. The criteria on the stability of the heteroclinic cycle for each model are also given, which are comparable with the corresponding continuous-time models.
Keywords: Attractor; Carrying simplex; Competitive map; Fixed point; Heteroclinic cycle; Repeller; Stability.