Modular and hierarchical modeling of interactive mobile agents

Sánchez-Herrera, Roberto; López-Mellado, Ernesto

doi:10.1109/icsmc.2004.1399889

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This hierarchical organization can be reiterated in a boundless way, allowing for open recursion in specifying the system’s hierarchical organization [9]. The idea of tokens being PN goes back to R. Valk [54], and NWN approaches are extensively studied in the PN literature [28, 33, 47, 9]. The Nets-Within-Nets (NWNs) formalism supports all capabilities of other high-level PN and can face the additional modeling requirements posed by ontogenetic processes [4, 2] as will be explained in the next sections.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nets-within-nets for modeling emergent patterns in ontogenetic processes

Bardini

Benso

Politano

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Ontogenesis is the development of an organism from its earliest stage to maturity, including homeostasis maintenance throughout adulthood despite environmental perturbations. Almost all cells of a multicellular organism share the same genomic information. Nevertheless, phenotypic diversity and complex supra-cellular architectures emerge at every level, starting from tissues and organs. This is possible thanks to a robust and dynamic interplay of regulative mechanisms. To study ontogenesis, it is necessary to consider different levels of regulation, both genetic and epigenetic. Each cell undergoes a specific path across a landscape of possible regulative states affecting both its structure and its functions during development. This paper proposes using the Nets-Within-Nets formalism, which combines Petri Nets' simplicity with the capability to represent and simulate the interplay between different layers of regulation connected by non-trivial and context-dependent hierarchical relations. In particular, this work introduces a modeling strategy based on Nets-Within-Nets that can model several critical processes involved in ontogenesis. Moreover, it presents a case study focusing on the first phase of Vulval Precursor Cells specification in C. Elegans. The case study shows that the proposed model can simulate the emergent morphogenetic pattern corresponding to the observed developmental outcome of that phase, in both the physiological case and different mutations. The model presented in the results section is available online at https://github.com/sysbio-polito/NWN_CElegans_VPC_model

show abstract