A Formal Framework for Composing Qualitative Models of Biological Systems

Abstract

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License Newcastle University ePrints-eprint.ncl.ac.uk

Developing Attractor Analysis Techniques for a Compositional Boolean Network Framework

“…This paper presented initial results on extending an existing compositional framework [3], [4] for Boolean networks with new novel techniques and tools for compositionally identifying attractors. This work was important as providing support for compositional attractor analysis is crucial for addressing the state space explosion problem and for ensuring the practical applicability of the compositional framework for engineering and analysing Boolean networks.…”

“…A compositional framework for Boolean networks was developed by Alkhudhayr and Steggles [2]- [4] based on composing Boolean networks by merging entities using Boolean connectives. In the sequel, let BN 1 = (G 1 , N ).…”

“…This limitation has led to the development of compositional techniques to support Boolean networks (for example, see [3], [16], [30]). In recent work [3], [4] an interesting new compositional approach was proposed based on composing two Boolean networks by merging entities using Boolean operators such as conjunction. This compositional framework set out to provide a foundation for both engineering Boolean networks and decomposing them to aid analysis.…”

“…In this paper we present the first initial work on developing techniques and tools for compositionally identifying attractors in the given compositional framework [3], [4]. The approach we develop is based on analysing each subnetwork's interference state graph [3], a state graph that extends a Boolean network normal behaviour with the additional dynamics arising from interference in a composition.…”